When he came this trip he was, as usual, brimming over with news:  personal items, public gossip, and the news that the horse teams had got most of their loading on, and that the Macs were getting their bullocks under way.  Two horse waggons and a dray for far “inside,” and three bullock waggons for the nearer distances, comprised the “waggons” that year.  The teamsters were Englishmen; but the bullock-punchers were three “Macs”—­an Irishman, a Highlander, and the Sanguine Scot.

Six waggons, and about six months’ hard travelling, in and out, to provide a year’s stores for three cattle stations and two telegraph stations.  It is not surprising that the freight per ton was what it was—­twenty-two pounds per ton for the Elsey, and upwards of forty pounds for “inside.”  It is this freight that makes the grocery bill such a big item on stations out-bush, where several tons of stores are considered by no means a large order.

Close on the heels of the Fizzer came other travellers, with the news that the horse teams had got going and the Macs had “pulled out” to the Four Mile.  “Your trunks’ll be along in no time now, missus,” one of them said.  “They’ve got ’em all aboard.”

The Dandy did some rapid calculations:  “Ten miles a day on good roads,” he said:  “one hundred and seventy miles.  Tens into that seventeen days.  Give ’em a week over for unforeseen emergencies, and call it four weeks.”  It sounded quite cheerful and near at hand, but a belated thunderstorm or two, and consequent bogs, nearly doubled the four weeks.

Almost every day we heard news of the teams from the now constant stream of travellers; and by the time the timber was all sawn and carted to the house to fulfil the many promises there, they were at the Katherine.

But if the teams were at the Katherine, so were the teamsters, and so was the Pub; and when teamsters and a pub get together it generally takes time to separate them, when that pub is the last for over a thousand miles.  One pub at the Katherine and another at Oodnadatta and between them over a thousand miles of bush, and desert and dust, and heat, and thirst.  That, from a teamster’s point of view, is the Overland Route from Oodnadatta to the Katherine.

A pub had little attraction for the Sanguine Scot, and provided he could steer the other Macs safely past the one at the Katherine, there would be no delay there with the trunks; but the year’s stores were on the horse teams and the station, having learnt bitter experience from the past, now sent in its own waggon for the bulk of the stores, as soon as they were known to be at the Katherine; and so the Dandy set off at once.

“You’ll see me within a fortnight, bar accidents” he called back, as the waggon lurched forward towards the slip-rails; and the pub also having little attraction for the Dandy, we decided to expect him, “bar accidents.”  For that matter, a pub had little attraction for any of the Elsey men, the Quiet Stockman being a total abstainer, and Dan knowing “how to behave himself,” although he owned to having “got a bit merry once or twice.”