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JIM KILLEN, the puntman, and his mate Tom had just swung back their pontoons after letting the old Pride of the Murray and her barges drop through from the wharf, when the exhaust of an incoming steamer was borne pantingly on the languid evening air. Jim put his hand to his ear to catch the sound more distinctly. Like most of the dwellers by the river-side he could distinguish the various boats by the tones of their escaping steam.

"It's the Little Lizzie," he growled to his assistant; "s'pose I'll have to let her through!"

"'Taint the Lizzie, Jim. It's Maltby's Hero!"

"Get alon' with you, you Sydney-side crow. Think I don't know every twist and turn of the little woman's steam-pipe? Listen there now--she's down by the Park, and she always speaks so when she's that far. 'Open the bridge, Jim! open the bridge, Jim!' that's what she says, and none but a derned fool of a cornstalk what don't know a side-saddle from a stern--wheeler would say dif'rent."

"Lor', Jim, don't get shirty, old man," said Tom, who, being a Sydney--side native, was contemptuously regarded as a "colonial" by Killen (imported by Government at a cost of £20 3s. 4d. in the days of assisted immigration). "You know better 'n me, of course. But what are you goin' to do? You won't let her through to-night? It's after knock-off time!"

"W'en a cove as don't know a steamer from a barge wants to boss this bridge, I tells him to shut up straight. So now, Tom Hopwood, shut up. The Little Lizzie's a-goin' through if the skipper wants her!"

And though the dusk was fast settling down into the long, sweeping reach that was crossed by the bridge, and though the steam-whistle of the crane-engine had shrieked the knock-off signal full fifteen minutes before, Jim swung wide the crazy old pontoons into the muddy stream. They swayed on their hempen hinges sullenly and creakingly, as though, too, convinced that it was quite time to end their long day's work.

The men hauled in one rope, slacked the bight of the other, and waited for the steamer. Tom had shirked his pull somewhat, and Jim knew it. But he heeded his mate's ill-temper as much as he did the mutual grinding of the pontoons, or the vexed beat of the river-ripples as they wrestled with the crumbling bank. If the Lizzie wanted to go through she should, and if she didn't, well, it didn't matter. So Jim, surly and precise always, and surly and precise in a double degree when it was a case of swinging the bridge after hours, resolved. Jim, like many a better and many a worse man, was, as he himself described it, "a bit weak on the womanines." That's what he used to say when accused of favouring the Lizzie by letting her pass the bridge at all sorts of unreasonable times and periods. But there was the Victoria, and the Emily Jane, and half-a-dozen other boats with feminine appellations, and the Alice, and he would never budge from the strict mark of duty and routine for them. And this circumstance--coupled with the fact that when flour was £70 a ton at Wilcannia and potatoes £15, and the great Cumberoona and the Little Lizzie, both loaded to the pilot-house with produce, were starting at the same moment for the drought-smitten Darling township, he had accidentally jammed a pontoon against the Cumberoona's starboard paddle (thereby smashing the box and several floats)--had tended rather to discredit his partiality for the sex.

"It isn't the Little Lizzie Jim favours," said "Gus" Pierce, of the Undaunted, the satirist of the Riverine; "it's the Lizzie's mate!" Gus was right, though it scarcely needed his keen vision to have discerned as much. Any one with the proverbial half-an-eye could have perceived the true cause of Mr. Killen's willingness to oblige the Lizzie. Certainly no one who noticed how, on this September evening, the ruggedness of his face softened as the "mate" hailed him, could have failed to understand the motive for his favouritism. For, sure enough, it was the Lizzie and her consort, the Wombat, that with great animalish gaspings and pantings stemmed the strong river, and forged breathlessly round the willowy bend, through the pontoons, past the half-buried hull of Cadell's old Lady Augusta, to her berth under the wharf cranes.

"Thank you, Jim," shouted the mate from the pilot-house; "you're a good soul to let me through to-night. It's worth ten pounds to me." And a flattered smile ironed out the furrows in Jim's countenance as he waved his hand in acknowledgment of the words. High-pitched was the majestic voice, but there was a note of mournful music in it which Jim, with his rude fancy, compared to a curlew's cry. No man's voice could claim that trill surely. The mate of the Lizzie was a woman.