“All right.  I’ll go now.”

“No,” looking me over dubiously, “you’d better not go there or anywhere else, in your present rig ... you’re too ragged to apply even for such work ... hang around till morning, and I’ll go home to-night and bring you a decent coat, at least.  Your coat is worse than your trousers ... though they are ravelled at the bottoms and coming through in the left knee ... every time you take a step I can see a glint of white through the cloth, and,” walking round me in a tour of inspection, “the seat might break through at any moment.”  All this was said without a glint of humour in his eyes.

* * * * *

Next morning the sky-pilot came down very late.  It was twelve.  But he had not forgotten me.  “Here’s the coat,” and he solemnly unwrapped and trailed before my astonished gaze a coat with a long, ministerial tail.  I put it on.  The tail came below the bend of my knees.  I laughed.  The sky-pilot did not.

Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, “You do look rather odd!”

The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.

“I say, what’s so funny?”

“Me!  I am!... in your long-tailed coat.”

“If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn’t see anything to laugh about.”

* * * * *

At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced, old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk’s high stool.  But he proved lively beyond his appearance.

“My God! do look who’s here!” he exclaimed facetiously, and then, rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, “no, there’s no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by ten o’clock this morning.”

I walked away, disconsolate.  I bore on my back my swagman’s blanket.  In the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort’s Greek New Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.

* * * * *

I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the South Sea King ... which lay in the harbour.

At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called “Nippers,” he said.  He, too, was going with the South Sea King ... not as a cattleman, but as stowaway.  He urged me to stow away along with him.  And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of “Skinny,” which the rest called me during the voyage.

* * * * *

We strolled up to the men and joined them.

“Hello, kids!”

“Hello, fellows!  Are you the cattlemen for the South Sea King?”