Robbery Under Arms

“There’d been a big tent rigged, as big as a small woolshed, too. It came out in a cart, and then another cart came with a couple of waiters, and they laid out a long table of boards on trestles with a real first-class feed on it, such as we’d never seen in our lives before. Fowls and turkeys and tongues and rounds of beef, beer and wine in bottles with gilt labels on. Such a setout it was. Father began to growl a bit. ‘If he’s going to feed the whole country this way, he’ll spend half the stuff before we get it, let alone drawing a down on the whole thing.’ But Jim and me could see how Starlight had been working the thing to rights while he was swelling it in the town among the big bugs. We told him the cattle would fetch that much more money on account of the lunch and the blowing the auctioneer was able to do. These would pay for the feed and the rest of the fal- lals ten times over. ‘When he gets in with men like his old pals he loses his head, I believe,’ father says, ‘and fancies he’s what he used to be. He’ll get “fitted” quite simple some day if he doesn’t keep a better look-out.”