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.
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.
