The roads round Argyle in Otago South slept, in their dust or their mud, six nights in the week. On Saturdays the boys from the run came in to distract Murray, who was police officer for thirty square miles of district, and to turn the five hotels inside out, putting them together again in the dawn-fog.
“Scannell’s lot” held the foremost reputation, from Binnie away north to the Shark’s Tooth, and beyond it. For Mains was a cattle station primarily, and Scannell was merciless to shirkers. And so, without any exception, were Scannell’s men.
It was on a wet Thursday in August that Mackerrow broke his leg and was sent to the hospital fifty miles away. It was on the Friday that Scannell’s teams creaked down the steep road to the township, unloaded sheep and rabbit skins at the siding through a blue-cold icy day, and filled up Blake’s bar-parlour afterwards. Tod was angry with Mackerrow, and he said so.
“I’m runnin’ couples wid Randal, now,” he said. “An’ Randal is not me pick at all. You remember what I tould ye last musterin’?”
Last mustering Tod and Randal had found a man—long dead—on the highest, cruellest peak on Mains Run. Tod had whistled his dogs off the bones, scraped a hole on the sunny side of a slope where the snow lay soft, and shoveled the ugly things in. Then he called
