cattle for sale, and if I'm down in the south-west the mob is sure
to be up in the far north-east, but it's all one to him. He wires
to me to go and inspect them quick and lively before someone else
gets them, and I ride and drive and coach hundreds of miles to get
at some flat-sided pike-horned mob of brutes without enough fat on
them to oil a man's hair with. I've to go right away out back now
and take over a place that the old man advanced some money on. He
was fool enough, or someone was fool enough for him, to advance
five thousand pounds on a block of new country with five thousand
cattle on it--book-muster, you know, and half the cattle haven't
been seen for years, and the other half are dead, I expect. Anyhow,
the man that borrowed the money is ruined, and I have to go up and
take over the station."

"What do you call a book-muster?" said the globe-trotter, who was
spending a month in the country, and would naturally write a book
on it.

"Book-muster, book-muster? Why, a book-muster is something like
dead-reckoning on a ship. You know what dead-reckoning is, don't
you? If a captain can't see the sun he allows for how fast the ship
is going, and for the time run and the currents, and all that, and
then reckons up where he is. I travelled with a captain once, and
so long as he stuck to dead-reckoning he was all right. He made
out we were off Cairns, and that's just where we were; because we
struck the Great Barrier Reef, and became a total wreck ten minutes
after. With the cattle it's just the same. You'll reckon the cattle
that you started with, add on each year's calves, subtract all that
you sell,--that is, if you ever do sell any--and allow for deaths,
and what the blacks spear and the thieves steal. Then you work out