The last ram butted Danny on the hip, so that he sent a kick after him as the gate swung idle. Then he sat on the rail to charge his pipe while Moody swept six more down the paddock to round up another mob.
"Yer a fair skunk, Lou," he said.
Lou cut tobacco slowly. The grease and dirt of sheep were on his bared arms and his shirt, and his boots were burst at the toes. But still there was something in the carriage of his head that would turn women and not a few men to look at him twice.
"Old Joe'U strike a snag in Mogger — .unless he's wanting ribbons," he said.
"I 'opes as Mogger'U do some strikin' 'fore long," said Danny, with feeling, and took six sets of rails and a gate in answer to Steve's howl from the filling pens.
He snatched a gum stick from somewhere, dived into the ruck, and hammered the stumbling bodies up the grating to the bowels of the shed. Here new sounds and new stenches held sway: the rasp of the presses forward, the mutter of the shears, the hundred other noises pent in by the dark of iron roof that creaked in the grasp of the sun rays.
There was smell of the tar-pot, and of sheep, and of heated men; and the strange oily scent of a well-yoked fleece. Danny slammed the gate behind the last straggler and made out for air, past the length of the board where
