Sat, each served with a slice of
damper that carried a smaller slice of beef upon it, providing the "push"
by cutting off small pieces of the beef with a pen-knife, and "pushing"
them along the damper to the edge of the slice, to be bitten off from
there in hearty mouthfuls.
No butter, of course. In Darwin, eight months before we had tasted our
last butter on ship-board, for tinned butter, out-bush, in the tropics,
is as palatable as castor oil. The tea had been made in the Maluka's
quart-pot, our cups having been carried dangling from our saddles, in the
approved manner of the bush-folk.
We breakfasted at the Springs, surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate
our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the
afternoon looking for a lost water-hole.
The Dandy was to build his yard at this hole when it was found, but the
difficulty was to find it. The Sanguine Scot had "dropped on it once,"
by chance, but lost his bearing later on. All we knew was that it was
there to be found somewhere in that corner of the run - a deep permanent
hole, "back in the scrub somewhere," according to the directions of the
Sanguine Scot.
