They brought a boy from Talloran to run McDooley's tracks.
They yarded him the fastest blood among the station cracks.
With moulds and shirt and sloucher hat and pipe with broken stem,
he slung into the saddle straight and waved his hand to them.
The sub was lately out from arm.
The troopers both were green.
The tracking of an outlaw was a game they had not seen.
This chippy little * and the antics that he played.
Oh,
they were rolling off their saddles at the funny sight he made.
The tracker had a roving eye.
He laughed a saucy laugh.
He grinned as they were grinning and he gave them chuff for chuff.
The troopers both were solid men whose brains had run to beef.
But when the boy got moving,
all their mirth was turned to grief.
He was cautious among the melon holes,
but where the plane was sound,
he led them at
a gallop with his eyes upon the ground.
And as odds are on a thoroughbred against a trooper's
hacks,
they were somewhat disconcerted at this mode of running tracks.
He took them
down the flinders where the spear grass lined the brink,
then crossed a stage of forty miles
without a drop to drink,
and down the beds of dried-up creeks they wandered all day long
till life seemed, in a trooper's view,
one endless billabong.
Then turned he sharply
to the west,
the Blue McKinley Range,
and gave them joys of spinifex in case they wished
to change,
and up and down the stony hills they tracked the guilty mick,
except when
they required a rest to be a little sick.
They hauled their horses after them when hills
were tough and high,
and still the sub remarked,
By Jove! his eyeglass in his eye,
and still
the black boy pointed to the tracks which he had seen,
until they fairly bottomed.
They
had struck a blind ravine.
Then one sharp-eyed suffering trooper gave a grunt of savage joy
and called aloud unto the sub,
and pointed to the boy,
The name upon them trousers!
Sure as God made little ants!
Look, sir,
this imp of Satan wears a pair of doolies' pants!
Like foot the tracker wheeled his
mount and vanished from their sight,
but as he thundered down the gorge he yelled with all his might,
The mick doolies' crossed the border now,
no run that fella in!
Next time you want him, tracker-boss,
don't get the mick doolies' chin!