Joe Wilson and His Mates [34]
is the only thing they've got to look forward to: it keeps their minds fixed
on something definite ahead.
--
* `Graft', work. The term is now applied, in Australia, to all sorts of work,
from bullock-driving to writing poetry.
--
But Mary kept her head pretty well through the first months of loneliness.
WEEKS, rather, I should say, for it wasn't as bad as it might have been
farther up-country: there was generally some one came of a Sunday afternoon
-- a spring-cart with a couple of women, or maybe a family, --
or a lanky shy Bush native or two on lanky shy horses. On a quiet Sunday,
after I'd brought Jim home, Mary would dress him and herself -- just the same
as if we were in town -- and make me get up on one end and put on a collar
and take her and Jim for a walk along the creek. She said she wanted
to keep me civilised. She tried to make a gentleman of me for years,
but gave it up gradually.
Well. It was the first morning on the creek: I was greasing
the waggon-wheels, and James out after the horse, and Mary
hanging out clothes, in an old print dress and a big ugly white hood,
when I heard her being hailed as `Hi, missus!' from the front slip-rails.
It was a boy on horseback. He was a light-haired, very much freckled boy
of fourteen or fifteen, with a small head, but with limbs,
especially his bare sun-blotched shanks, that might have belonged
to a grown man. He had a good face and frank grey eyes.
An old, nearly black cabbage-tree hat rested on the butts of his ears,
turning them out at right angles from his head, and rather dirty
sprouts they were. He wore a dirty torn Crimean shirt;
and a pair of man's moleskin trousers rolled up above the knees,
with the wide waistband gathered under a greenhide belt.
I noticed, later on, that, even when he wore trousers short enough for him,
he always rolled 'em up above the knees when on horseback,
for some reason of his own: to suggest leggings, perhaps,
for he had them rolled up in all weathers, and he wouldn't have bothered
to save them from the sweat of the horse, even if that horse ever sweated.
He was seated astride a three-bushel bag thrown across the ridge-pole
of a big grey horse, with a coffin-shaped head, and built astern
something after the style of a roughly put up hip-roofed box-bark humpy.*
His colour was like old box-bark, too, a dirty bluish-grey;
and, one time, when I saw his rump looming out of the scrub, I really thought
it was some old shepherd's hut that I hadn't noticed there before.
When he cantered it was like the humpy starting off on its corner-posts.
--
* `Humpy', a rough hut.
--
`Are you Mrs Wilson?' asked the boy.
`Yes,' said Mary.
`Well, mother told me to ride acrost and see if you wanted anythink.
We killed lars' night, and I've fetched a piece er cow.'
`Piece of WHAT?' asked Mary.
He grinned, and handed a sugar-bag across the rail with something heavy
in the bottom of it, that nearly jerked Mary's arm out when she took it.
It was a piece of beef, that looked as if it had been cut off with a wood-axe,
but it was fresh and clean.
`Oh, I'm so glad!' cried Mary. She was always impulsive,
save to me sometimes. `I was just wondering where we were going to get
any fresh meat. How kind of your mother! Tell her I'm very much
obliged to her indeed.' And she felt behind her for a poor little purse
she had. `And now -- how much did your mother say it would be?'
The boy blinked at her, and scratched his head.
`How much will it be,' he repeated, puzzled. `Oh -- how much does it weigh
I-s'pose-yer-mean. Well, it ain't been weighed at all -- we ain't got
no scales. A butcher does all that sort of think. We just kills it,
and cooks it, and eats it -- and goes by guess. What won't keep
we salts down in the cask. I reckon it weighs about a ton by the weight of it
if yer wanter know. Mother thought that if she sent any more
it would go bad before you could scoff it. I can't see ----'
`Yes, yes,' said Mary, getting confused. `But what I want to