Then my turn came.  A surcingle—­one of the long thick straps that keep all firm on a pack-horse—­was buckled through the pulley, and the Maluka crossed first, just to test its safety.  It was safe enough; but as he was dragged through the water most of the way, the pleasantness of “getting across” on the wire proved a myth.

Mac shortened the strap, and then sat me in it, like a child in a swing.  “Your lighter weight will run clear of the water,” he said, with his usual optimism.  “It’s only a matter of holding on and keeping cool”; and as the Maluka began to haul he added final instructions.  “Hang on like grim death, and keep cool, whatever happens,” he said.

I promised to obey, and all went well until I reached mid-stream.  Then, the wire beginning to sag threateningly towards the water, Mac flung his whole weight on to his end of it, and, to his horror, I shot up into the air like a sky-rocket.

“Hang on!  Keep cool!” Mac yelled, in a frenzy of apprehension, as he swung on his end of the wire.  Jackeroo became convulsed with laughter, but the Maluka pulled hard, and I was soon on the right side of the river, declaring that I preferred experiences when they were over.  Later Mac accounted for his terror with another unconscious flash of humour.  “You never can count on a woman keeping cool when the unexpected happens,” he said.

We offered to haul him over.  “It’s only a matter of holding on and keeping cool,” we said; but he preferred to swim.

“It’s a pity you didn’t think of telegraphing this performance,” I shouted across the floods; but, in his relief, Mac was equal to the occasion.

“I’m glad I didn’t,” he shouted back gallantly, with a sweeping flourish of his hat; “it might have blocked you coming.”  The bushman was learning a new accomplishment.

As his clothes were to come across on the wire, I was given a hint to “make myself scarce”; so retired over the bank, and helped Jackeroo with the dinner camp—­an arrangement that exactly suited his ideas of the eternal fitness of things.

During the morning he had expressed great disapproval that a woman should be idle, while men dragged heavy weights about.  “White fellow, big-fellow-fool all right,” he said contemptuously, when Mac explained that it was generally so in the white man’s country.  A Briton of the Billingsgate type would have appealed to Jackeroo as a man of sound common sense.

By the time the men-folk appeared, he had decided that with a little management I would be quite an ornament to society.  “Missus bin help me all right,” he told the Sanguine Scot, with comical self-satisfaction.

Mac roared with delight, and the passage of the Fergusson having swept away the last lingering torch of restraint he called to the Maluka; “Jackeroo reckons he’s tamed the shrew for us.”  Mac had been a reader of Shakespeare in his time.