BIG, burly Tom M'Grundy, with the thirst of a sponge, features of a red, red nose, the heart of an angel, and the financial genius of a Wilkins Micawber--his I. O. U.s and P. N.s would have covered the Old Man Plain with a pavement of tesselated indebtedness--drove up to the boats as they were raising steam for the trip to Echuca. They had dropped down from the wharves overnight, and had tied up at the south bank of the Murrumbidgee, just below the bend in the stream where the one hundred and fifty acre police paddock runs into Mungadel Station. Both the steamers--the Jessie Jane and the Resolution--were under M'Grundy's agency, and while there was no dodge that Mac could not work to steal a march upon an opposing firm--the rivers ring yet with the way he "did" McCulloch's Hay manager (Fehon, present N. S. W. Railway Commissioner, was boss of the big concern then) out of £2000 worth of wool freight--he was studiously just to the several owners he represented. He tapped them for loans and drinks with equal impartiality, and he gave the "little" men with the one cranky steamer and the solitary crazy barge the same show for cutting a plummy slice out of the rich cake of the season's wool-traffic, as he did the "bigger" men, who had half-a-dozen steamers and twice as many barges. No flunkeyish, kiss-his-hand favouritism to the well-in owner was ever shown by Tom M'Grundy, and it would have been better for the small men on the rivers had all the agents and managers followed his lead.
The Jessie Jane was a small man's craft, skippered by its owner, and under the double disadvantage of carrying with its cargo an eternally-on--the-eve-of-going-to-blazes boiler and a tremendous mortgage; while the Resolution belonged to a man who was being helped literally by a bank, and who--though bound to go under some time like all bank-made creatures (some day I'll recite certain legends of a Riverina bank-sweating room)--would be "on the top" for five seasons or so. Therefore Tom M'Grundy would, without doubt, have found it in the long run much more to his own profit had he favoured the Resolution. But that was not his way of doing business.
As he drew rein on the sandy hummock, he hailed the crafts which the freshet was jostling restlessly against one another. The gilded, brassy Resolution, with a barge lashed a-beam, lay astern of the beggarly Jessie Jane, which looked as if the current half-year's interest on the mortgage now just due would sink her to the bottom of the river; and the big boat now and then stuck her nose more viciously into her shabby rival, as though she would smash her from very contempt. The Resolution and her barge were carrying twelve hundred bales of "way back" clips, and the tarpaulined pile towered majestically above the four hundred which were all the Jessie and her barge were permitted by stern Tommy Freeman, the Echuca representative of the Melbourne Underwriters' Association, to load up with.
The contrast between the two crafts was so forcible, that even unreflective Tom Mac was struck by it, and hesitated, after hailing, as to whether it would not, as a mere matter of business, be the better policy to give the commission direct to the Resolution, instead of making it a matter of competition. Before he could decide, however, slim Jim Barton, owner and master of the Jessie Jane, was clambering up the bank in answer to his call.
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