It was after one o’clock in the morning when Cow Flat was reached.  The little township slept, steeped in darkness, beside its sluggish strip of creeping ‘slurry’ miscalled a creek.  Beyond, on the rise, a big mine clattered and groaned, and puffed its glowing clouds of steam against the sky; but Cow Flat had settled down into silence after the midnight change of shifts, and a mining township sleeps well.  For all that it was a stealthy and cautious band Moonlighter led down to the old battered engine-house by the edge of the common, where the goats of Cow Flat were known to herd in large numbers.  Sure enough here were goats of both sexes, and all sorts and sizes—­sleeping huddled in the ruined engine-house, on the sides of the grass-grown tip, in the old bob-pit, and upon the remains of the fallen stack.  Carefully and quietly the animals were awakened; slyly they were drawn forth, with gentle whispered calls of ‘Nan, nan, nan!’ and insidious and soothing words, but more especially with the aid of scraps of carrot, sparingly but judiciously distributed.  An occasional low, querulous bleat from a youthful nanny awakened from dreams of clover-fields, or a hoarse, imperious inquiry in a deep baritone ‘baa’ from a patriarchal he-goat, was the only noise that followed the invasion.  Then, when the animals within the ruin were fully alive to the situation and awake to the knowledge that it all meant carrots, and that outside carrots innumerable awaited the gathering, they streamed forth:  they fought in the doorways, they battered a passage through the broken wall; faint plaintive queries went up from scores of throats, answered by gluttonous mumblings from goats that had been fortunate enough to snatch a morsel of the delectable vegetable.  Down from the tips and up from the bob-pit they came, singly and in sets, undemonstrative matrons with weak-kneed twins at their heels, skittish kids and bearded veterans, and joined the anxious, eager, hungry mob.

‘Away with them, my boys,’ ordered Moonlighter.  ’Head ’em fer the common.  We’ll have every blessed goat in the place.’

He sent away three bands in three different directions, fully provisioned, and commissioned to collect goats from all quarters.

’Bring ’em up to the main mob on the common, an’ the man what makes a row I’ll hang in his shirt to the nearest tree.  Don’t leave the beggars any kind of a goat at all.’

Dick had undertaken a big contract.  Cow Flat was simply infested with goats; every family owned its small flock, and the milk-supply of the township depended entirely upon the droves of nannies that grubbed for sustenance on the stony ridges or the bare, burnt stretch of common land.  Probably Cow Flat was so called because nobody had ever seen anything remotely resembling a cow anywhere in the vicinity; consequently goats were hold in high esteem, for ten goats can live and prosper where one cow would die of hunger and melancholy in a month.