But, painstaking as our Department is with our mailmatter, it excels itself in its handling of telegrams.  Southern red tape has decreed—­no doubt wisely as far as it goes—­that telegrams shall travel by official persons only; but out-bush official persons are few, and apt to be on duty elsewhere when important telegrams arrive; and it is then that our Department draws largely on that surplus supply of common sense.

Always deferential to the South, it obediently pigeon-holes the telegram, to await some official person, then, knowing that a delay of weeks will probably convert it into so much waste paper, it writes a “duplicate,” and goes outside to send it “bush” by the first traveller it can find.  If no traveller is at hand, the “Line” is “called up” and asked if any one is going in the desired direction from elsewhere; if so, the “duplicate” is repeated “down the line,” but if not, a traveller is created in the person of a black boy by means of a bribing stick of tobacco.  No extra charge, of course.  Nothing is an extra in the Territory.  “Nothing to do with the Department,” says the chief; “merely the personal courtesy of our officers.”  May it be many a long day before the forgotten shipment of red tape finds its way to the Territory to strangle the courtesy of our officers!

Nothing finds itself outside this courtesy.  The Fizzer brings in great piles of mail-matter, unweighed and unstamped, with many of the envelopes bursting or, at times, in place of an envelope, a request for one; and “our officers,” getting to work with their “courtesy,” soon put all in order, not disdaining even the licking of stamps or the patching or renewing of envelopes.  Letters and packets are weighed, stamped, and repaired—­often readdressed where addresses for South are blurred; stamps are supplied for outgoing mail-matter and telegrams; postage-dues and duties paid on all incoming letters and parcels—­in fact, nothing is left for us to do but to pay expenses incurred when the account is rendered at the end of each six months.  No doubt our Department would also read and write our letters for us if we wished it, as it does, at times, for the untutored.

Wherever it can, it helps the bush-folk, and they, in turn, doing what they can to help it in self-imposed task, are ever ready to “find room somewhere” in pack-bags or swags for mail-matter in need of transport assistance—­the general opinion being that “a man that refuses to carry a man’s mail to him ’ud be mean enough to steal bread out of a bird-cage.”

In all the knowledge of the bush-folk, only one man had proved “mean enough.”  A man who shall be known as the Outsider, for he was one of a type who could never be one of the bush-folk, even though he lived out-bush for generations:  a man so walled in with self and selfishness that, look where he would, he could see nothing grander or better than his own miserable self, and knowing all a mail means to a bushman, he could refuse to carry a neighbour’s mail—­even though his road lay through that neighbour’s run—­because he had had a difference with him.