We of the Never-Never. Jeannie Gunn
sharp turn round a patch of scrub, and before any one realised what was happening we were in the midst of a mob of pack horses, and face to face with the Quiet Stockman a strong, erect, young Scot, who carried his six foot two of bone and muscle with the lithe ease of a bushman.
“Hallo” Mac shouted, pulling up. Then, with the air of a showman introducing some rare exhibit, added: “This is the missus, Jack.”
Jack touched his hat and moved uneasily in his saddle, answering Mac’s questions in monosyllables. Then the Măluka came up, and Mac, taking pity on the embarrassed bushman, suggested “getting along,” and we left him sitting rigidly on his horse, trying to collect his scattered senses.
“That was unrehearsed,” Mac chuckled, as we drove on. “He’s clearing out! Reckon he didn’t set out exactly hoping to meet us, though. Tam’s a lady’s man in comparison,” but loyal to his comrade above his amusement, he added warmly: “You can’t beat Jack by much, though, when it comes to sticking to a pal,” unconscious that he was prophesying of the years to come, when the missus had become one of those pals.
“There’s only the Dandy left now,” Mac went on, as we spun along an ever more definite track, “and he’ll be all right as soon as he gets used to it. Never knew such a chap for finding something decent in everybody he strikes.” Naturally I hoped he would “find something decent in me,” having learned what it meant to the stockmen to have a woman pitchforked into their daily lives, when those lives were to be lived side by side, in camp, or in saddle, or at the homestead.
Mac hesitated a moment, and then out flashed one of his happy inspirations. “Don’t you bother about the Dandy,” he said; “bushmen have a sixth sense, and know a pal when they see one.”
Just a bushman’s pretty speech, aimed straight at the heart of a woman, where all the pretty speeches of the bushfolk are aimed; for it is by the heart that they judge us. “Only a pal,” they will say, towering strong and protecting; and the woman feels uplifted, even though in the same breath they have honestly agreed with her, after careful scrutiny, that it is not her fault that she was born into the plain sisterhood. Bushmen will risk their lives for a woman pal or otherwise but leave her to pick up her own handkerchief.
“Of course!” Mac added, as an afterthought. “It’s not often they find a pal in a woman”; and I add to-day that when they do, that woman is to be envied her friends.
“Eyes front!” Mac shouted suddenly, and in a moment the homestead was in sight, and the front gate forty-five miles behind us. “If ever you do reach the homestead alive,” the Darwin ladies had said; and now they were three hundred miles away from us to the north-west.
“Sam’s spotted us!” Mac smiled as we skimmed on, and a slim little Chinaman ran across between the buildings. “We’d better do the thing in style,” and whipping up the horses, he whirled them through the open slip-rails, past the stockyards, away across the grassy homestead enclosure, and pulled up with a rattle of hoofs and wheels at the head of a little avenue of buildings.
The Dandy, fresh and spotless, appeared in a doorway; black boys sprang up like a crop of mushrooms and took charge of the buck-board; Dan rattled in with the pack-teams, and horses were jangling hobbles and rattling harness all about us, as I found myself standing in the shadow of a queer, unfinished building, with the Măluka and Mac surrounded by a mob of leaping, bounding dogs, flourishing, as best they could, another “Welcome home!”
“Well?” Mac asked, beating off dogs at every turn. “Is it a House or a Hut?”
“A Betwixt and Between,” we decided; and then the Dandy was presented, And the steady grey eyes apparently finding “something decent” in the missus, with a welcoming smile and ready tact he said:
“I’m sure we’re all real glad to see you.” Just the tiniest emphasis on the word “you”; but that, and the quick, bright look that accompanied the emphasis, told, as nothing else could, that it was “that other woman” that had not been wanted. Unconventional, of course; but when a welcome is conventional out-bush, it is unworthy of the name of welcome.
The Măluka, knew this well, but before he could speak, Mac had seized a little half-grown dog—the most persistent of all the leaping dogs—by her tightly curled-up tail, and, setting her down at my feet, said: “And this is Tiddle’ums,” adding, with another flourishing bow, “A present from a Brither Scot,” while Tiddle’ums in no way resented the dignity. Having a tail that curled tightly over her back like a cup handle, she expected to be lifted up by it.
Then one after the other Mac presented the station dogs: Quart-Pot, Drover, Tuppence, Misery, Buller, and a dozen others; and as I bowed gravely to each in turn Dan chuckled in appreciation: “She’ll do! Told you she was the dead finish.”
Then the introductions over, the Măluka said: “And now I suppose she may consider herself just ‘One of Us.’ ”
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