News!  He had said he had stacks of it, and he now bubbled over with it.  The horse teams were “just behind,” and the Macs almost at the front gate.  The Sanguine Scot?  Of course he was all right:  always was, but reckoned bullock-punching wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; thought his troubles were over when he got out of the sandy country, but hadn’t reckoned on the black soil flats.  “Wouldn’t be surprised if he took to punching something else besides bullocks before he’s through with it,” the Fizzer shouted, roaring with delight at the recollection of the Sanguine Scot in a tight place.  On and on he went with his news, and for two hours afterwards, as we sat chewing the cud of our mail-matter, we could hear him laughing and shouting and “chiacking.”

At daybreak he was at it again, shouting among his horses, as he culled his team of “done-ups,” and soon after breakfast was at the head of the south track with all aboard.

“So long, chaps,” he called.  “See you again half-past eleven four weeks”; and by “half-past eleven four weeks” he would have carried his precious freight of letters to the yearning, waiting men and women hidden away in the heart of Australia, and be out again, laden with “inside” letters for the outside world.

At all seasons of the year he calls the first two hundred miles of his trip a “kid’s game.”  “Water somewhere nearly every day, and a decent camp most nights.”  And although he speaks of the next hundred and fifty as being a “bit off during the Dry,” he faces its seventy-five-mile dry stage, sitting loosely in the saddle, with the same cheery “So long, chaps.”

Five miles to “get a pace up”—­a drink, and then that seventy-five miles of dry, with any “temperature they can spare from other parts,” and not one drop of water in all its length for the horses.  Straight on top of that, with the same horses and the same temperature, a run of twenty miles, mails dropped at Newcastle Waters, and another run of fifty into Powell’s Creek, dry or otherwise according to circumstances.

“Takes a bit of fizzing to get into the Powell before the fourth sundown,” the Fizzer says—­for, forgetting that there can be no change of horses, and leaving no time for a “spell” after the “seventy-five-mile dry “—­the time limit for that one hundred and fifty miles, in a country where four miles an hour is good travelling on good roads has been fixed at three and a half days.  “Four, they call it,” says the Fizzer, “forgetting I can’t leave the water till midday.  Takes a bit of fizzing all right”; and yet at Powell’s Creek no one has yet discovered whether the Fizzer comes at sundown, or the sun goes down when the Fizzer comes.

“A bit off,” he calls that stage, with a school-boy shrug of his shoulders; but at Renner’s Springs, twenty miles farther on, the shoulders set square, and the man comes to the surface.  The dice-throwing begins there, and the stakes are high—­a man’s life against a man’s judgment.