From day to day they travel on, often losing the count of the days, with those lines always above them, and those beckoning posts ever running on before them and as they travel, now and then they touch a post for company—­shaking hands with Outside:  touching now and then a post for company, and daily realising the company and comfort those posts and wires can be.  Here at least is something in touch with the world something vibrating with the lives and actions of men, and an ever-present friend in dire necessity.  With those wires above him, any day a traveller can cry for help to the Territory, if he call while he yet has strength to climb one of those friendly posts and cut that quivering wire—­for help that will come speedily, for the cutting of the telegraph wire is as the ringing of an alarm-bell throughout the Territory.  In all haste the break is located, and food, water, and every human help that suggests itself sent out from the nearest telegraph station.  There is no official delay—­there rarely is in the Territory—­for by some marvellous good fortune, there everything belongs to the Department in which it finds itself.

Just as Happy Dick is one of the pillars of the line party, so the line party is one of the pillars of the line itself.  Up and down this great avenue, year in year out it creeps along, cutting scrub and repairing as it goes, and moving cumbrous main camps from time to time, with its waggon loads of stores, tents, furnishings, flocks of milking goats, its fowls, its gramophone, and Chinese cook.  Month after month it creeps on, until, reaching the end of the section, it turns round to creep out again.

Year in, year out, it had crept in and out, and for twenty years Happy Dick had seen to its peace and comfort.  Nothing ever ruffled him.  “All in the game” was his nearest approach to a complaint, as he pegged away at his work, in between whiles going to the nearest station for killers, carting water in tanks out to “dry stage camps,” and doing any other work that found itself undone.  Dick’s position was as elastic as his smile.

He considered himself an authority on three things only:  the line party, dog-fights, and cribbage.  All else, including his dog Peter and his cheque-book, he left to the discretion of his fellow-men.

Peter—­a speckled, drab-coloured, prick-eared creation, a few sizes larger than a fox-terrier—­could be kept in order with a little discretion, and by keeping hands off Happy Dick; but all the discretion in the Territory, and a unanimous keeping off of hands, failed to keep order in the cheque-book.

The personal payment of salaries to men scattered through hundreds of miles of bush country being impracticable, the department pays all salaries due to its servants into their bank accounts at Darwin, and therefore when Happy Dick found himself the backbone of the line party, he also found himself the possessor of a cheque-book.  At first he was inclined to look upon it as a poor substitute for hard cash; but after the foreman had explained its mysteries, and taught him to sign his name in magic tracery, he became more than reconciled to it and drew cheques blithely, until one for five pounds was returned to a creditor:  no funds—­and in due course returned to Happy Dick.