Seven Little Australians Part 24

"'Oh that I was where I would be!

Then I would be where I am not: But where I am I still must be, And where I would be I cannot.'

"Meg, I WISH you would stop treading on my toes."

So after that even Mr. Gillet grew gay and talkative, to show he was enjoying himself, and the bullocks caught the infection of the br.i.m.m.i.n.g spirits behind them, and moved a LEETLE bit faster than snails. When they had crept along over about ten miles, however, the slow motion and the heat that beat down sobered them a little.

"Miss Meg, that silver-grey gum before you, guileless of leaves, indicates Duck Water."

How glad they were to unfold themselves and stretch out their arms and legs on the ground at last. No one had dreamt riding behind a bullock team could have been so "flat, stale, and unprofitable," as it was after the first mile or two.

Then the trolly continued its course.

"I doubt if they will be back before the sun goes down, if they don't go a little quicker," Mr. Gillet said; "it is lunch-time now."

They were in a great gra.s.sed paddock that at one end fell abruptly down to the ravine and swamp lands known as "Duck Water."

A belt of great trees made a shade at one side, and along the other was the barbed-wire fence that showed they had not got away from the Yarrahappini estate even yet: higher up was the lonely bark hut of one of the stockmen.

They went up in a body to speak to him before he joined the bullock team, and to view his solitary dwelling.

Just a small room it was, with a wide fireplace and chimney, where hung a frying-pan, a billy, a cup, and a spoon. There was a bunk in one corner, with a couple of blue blankets on it, a deal table and one chair in the middle of the room. Over the fire-place hung a rough cupboard, made out of a soap-box, and used to hold rations. From a nail in the low ceiling a mosquito-net bag was suspended, and the buzzing flies around proclaimed that it held meat. The walls were papered with many a copy of "The Ill.u.s.trated Sydney News", and "The Town and Country Journal"; there was a month-old "Daily Telegraph"

lying on the chair, where the owner had laid it down.

A study in brown the stockman was, brown, dull eyes; brown, dusty-looking hair; brown skin, sundried and shrivelled; brown, unkempt beard; brown trousers of corduroy, and brown coat.

His pipe was black, however--a clay, that looked as if it had been smoked for twenty years.

"Wouldn't you like to be nearer the homestead?" Meg asked. "Isn't it lonely?"

"Not ter mention," the brown man said to his pipe or his beard.

"What do you do with yourself when you're, not outside?" asked Pip.

"Smoke," said the man.

"But on Sundays, and all through the evenings?"

"Smoke," he said.

"On Cwismas day," Baby said, pressing to see this strange man; "zen what does you do?"

"Smoke" he said.

Judy wanted to know how long he'd lived in the little place, and everyone was stricken dumb to hear he had been there most of the time for seven years.

"Don't you ever forget how to talk?" she said, in an awestruck voice.

But he answered laconically to his beard that there was the cat.

Baby had found it already under the kerosene tin that did duty for a bucket, and it had scratched her in three places: brown, like its master, it was evil-eyed, fiercely whiskered, thin as a rail; still, there was the affection of years between the two.

Mr. Gillet told him of the squatter's wish that he should go with the other men and help with the tree. He pulled a brown hat over his brow and moved away towards the bullock-dray, which had crept up the winding road by now, to the hill-top.

"Water in tub, nearer than creek," he muttered to his pipe before he went, and they found his tub-tank and gladly filled the billy ready for lunch.

Mrs. Ha.s.sal's roast fowls and duck tasted well; even though they frizzled on the plates as if the sun were trying to finish their cooking. And the apple tarts and apricot turnovers vanished speedily; and of the fruit salad that came forth from two screw-top bottles, not a teaspoonful remained to tell a tale.

Mr. Gillet had brought materials for a damper, by special request, and after lunch prepared to make it, so they might have it for afternoon tea.

"Pheough!" said Judy. "Is THAT how you make it? You need not give ME any."

It certainly was manufactured with surprising celerity.

Mr. Gillet merely tossed some flour from a bag out upon a plate, added a pinch of salt and some water; then he shaped it into a cake of dough, and laid it on the ashes of the fire, covering it all over with the hot, silver ash.

"HOW dirty!" said Nell, elevating her pretty little nose.

But when it was cooked, and Mr. Gillet lifted it up and dusted the ash away--lo! it was high and light and beautifully white.

So they ate it, and took mental marginal notes to make it in the paddocks at Misrule for each and every picnic to come.

They piled up two plates of good things and put in the brown man's cupboard, and Mr. Gillet laid his unread English papers on the chair near the cat.

"That 'Telegraph' is a month old," he said deprecatingly seeing Meg smile upon him her first smile that day.

CHAPTER XIX

A Pale-Blue Hair Ribbon

She in her virginal beauty As pure as a pictured saint, How should this sinning and sorrow Have for her danger or taint?

The reason our sweet pale Margaret had been reluctant of her smiles was on account of the very man who alone missed them.

Quite a warm friendship had sprung up during the month between the little fair-faced girl, who looked with such serene blue eyes to a future she felt must be beautiful, and the world-worn man, who looked back to a past all blackened and unlovely by his own acts.

He rode with the two girls every-day, because Mrs. Ha.s.sal did not like them going long distances alone; and, seeing Judy seldom walked her horse, and Meg's steed had not a canter in it, it fell out that he kept beside the slow and timid rider all the time.

"You remind me of a little sister I had who died," he said slowly to Meg once, after a long talk. "Perhaps if she were alive now I should not be quite so contemptible."

Meg's face flushed scarlet, and a shamed look had come into her eyes.

It seemed altogether terrible to her that he should know she knew of his failing.

"Perhaps it makes her sorry now," she said in a whisper he scarcely heard, and then she grew pale at her boldness, and rode on a little way to hide her distressed looks.

On the way home the pale-blue ribbon, that tied the strands of her sunny plait together, blew off. He dismounted and picked it up.