“Then I am very glad you have had a day’s sport, leastways a night’s, I call it, since it has made you comfortable, Jacky.”

“Oh! yes, very comfortable now,” and his white teeth and bright eye proclaimed the relief and satisfaction his little trip had afforded his nature.

“There, Jacky, if the ointment is worth the trouble it gives me rubbing of it in, that sheep won’t ever catch the scab, I do think.  Well, Jacky, seems to me I ought to ask your pardon—­I did you wrong.  I never expected you would leave the kangaroos and opossums for me once you were off.  But I suppose fact is you haven’t quite forgotten Twofold Bay.”

“Two fool bay!” inquired Jacky, puzzled.

“Where I first fell in with you.  You made one in a hunt that day, only instead of hunting you was hunted and pretty close, too, and if I hadn’t been a good cricketer and learned to fling true—­Why, I do declare I think he has forgotten the whole thing, shark and all!”

At the word shark a gleam of intelligence came to the black’s eye; it was succeeded by a look of wonder.  “Shark come to eat me—­you throw stone—­so we eat him.  I see him now a little—­a very little—­dat a long way off—­a very long way off.  Jacky can hardly see him when he try a good deal.  White fellow see a long way off behind him back—­dat is very curious.”

George colored.  “You are right, lad—­it was a long while ago, and I am vexed for mentioning it.  Well, any way you are come back and you are welcome.  Now you shall do a little of the light work, but I’ll do all the heavy work because I’m used to it;” and indeed poor George did work and slave like Hercules; forty times that day he carried a full-sized sheep in his hands a distance of twenty yards and flung her into the water and splashed in and rubbed her back in the water.

The fourth day after Jacky’s return George asked him to go all over the ground and tell him how many sheep he saw give signs of the fatal disorder.

About four o’clock in the afternoon Jacky returned driving before him with his spear a single sheep.  The agility of both the biped and quadruped were droll; the latter every now and then making a rapid bolt to get back to the pasture and Jacky bounding like a buck and pricking her with a spear.

For the first time he found George doing nothing.  “Dis one scratch um back—­only dis one.”

“Then we have driven out the murrain and the rest will live.  A hard fight!  Jacky, a hard fight! but we have won it at last.  We will rub this one well; help me put her down, for my head aches.”

After rubbing her a little George said, “Jacky, I wish you would do it for me, for my head do ache so I can’t abide to hold it down and work, too.”

After dinner they sat and looked at the sheep feeding.  “No more dis,” said Jacky gayly, imitating a sheep rubbing against a tree.

“No!  I have won the day; but I haven’t won it cheap.  Jacky, that fellow, Abner, was a bad man—­an ungrateful man.”