"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.
Some people speak of the Fizzer's luck, and say he'll pull through, if
any one can. It is luck, perhaps - but not in the sense they mean - to
have the keen judgment to know to an ounce what a horse has left in him,
judgment to know when to stop and when to go on - for that is left to the
Fizzer's discretion; and with that judgment the dauntless courage to go
on with, and win through, every task attempted.
The Fizzer changes horses at Renner's Springs for the "Downs' trip"; and
as his keen eyes run over the mob, his voice raps out their verdict like
an auctioneer's hammer. "He's fit. So is he. Cut that one out. That
colt's A1. The chestnut's done. So is the brown. I'll risk that mare.
That black's too fat." No hesitation: horse after horse rejected or
approved, until the team is complete; and then driving them before him he
faces the Open Downs - the Open Downs, where the last mail-man perished;
and only the men who know the Downs in the Dry know what he faces.
For five trips out of the eight, one hundred and thirty miles of
sun-baked, crab-holed, practically trackless plains, no sign of human
habitation anywhere, cracks that would swallow a man - "hardly enough
wood to boil a quart pot," the Fizzer says, and a sun-temperature
hovering about 160 degrees (there is no shade-temperature on the Downs);
shadeless, trackless, sun-baked, crab-holed plains, and the Fizzer's team
a moving speck in the centre of an immensity that, never diminishing and
never changing, moves onward with the team; an immensity of quivering
heat and glare, with that one tiny living speck in its centre, and in all
that hundred and thirty miles one drink for the horses at the end of the
first eighty.
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