For the next couple of weeks, affairs
at Kuryong flowed on in usual station style.
A saddle-horse was brought in for Miss Grant, and out
of her numerous boxes that young lady produced a Bond
Street outfit that fairly silenced criticism.
She rode well too, having been taught in England,
and she, Poss, Binjie and Hugh had some great scampers
after kangaroos, half-wild horses, or anything else
that would get up and run in front of them. She
was always so fresh, cheerful, and ready for any excitement
that the two boys became infatuated in four days, and
had to be hunted home on the fifth, or they would
have both proposed. Some days she spent at the
homestead housekeeping, cooking, and giving out rations
to swagmen the wild, half-crazed travellers
who came in at sundown for the dole of flour, tea
and sugar, which was theirs by bush custom. Some
days she spent with the children, and with them learnt
a lot of bush life. It being holiday-time, they
practically ran wild all over the place, spending
whole days in long tramps to remote parts in pursuit
of game. They had no “play,” as that
term is known to English children. They didn’t
play at being hunters. They were hunters in real
earnest, and their habits and customs had come to
resemble very closely those of savage tribes that
live by the chase.
With them Mary had numberless new
experiences. She got accustomed to seeing the
boys climb big trees by cutting steps in the bark with
a tomahawk, going out on the most giddy heights after
birds’ nests, or dragging the opossum from his
sleeping-place in a hollow limb. She learned
to hold a frenzied fox-terrier at the mouth of a hollow
log, ready to pounce on the kangaroo-rat which had
taken refuge there, and which flashed out as if shot
from a catapult on being poked from the other end
with a long stick. She learned to mark the hiding-place
of the young wild-ducks that scuttled and dived, and
hid themselves with such super-natural cunning in
the reedy pools. She saw the native companions,
those great, solemn, grey birds, go through their fantastic
and intricate dances, forming squares, pirouetting,
advancing, and retreating with the solemnity of professional
dancing-masters. She lay on the river-bank with
the children, gun in hand, breathless with excitement,
waiting for the rising of the duck-billed platypus that
quaint combination of fish, flesh and fowl as
he dived in the quiet waters, a train of small bubbles
marking his track. She fished in deep pools for
the great, sleepy, hundred-pound cod-fish that sucked
down bait and hook, holus-bolus, and then
were hauled in with hardly any resistance, and lived
for days contentedly, tethered to the bank by a line
through their gills.
In these amusements time passed pleasantly
enough, and by the time school-work was resumed Mary
Grant had become one of the family.
Of Hugh she at first saw little.
His work took him out on the run all day long, looking
after sheep in the paddocks, or perhaps toiling
day after day in the great, dusty drafting-yards.
In the cool of the afternoon the two girls would often
canter over the four miles or so of timbered country
to the yards, and wait till Hugh had finished his day’s
work. As a rule, Poss or Binjie, perhaps both,
were in attendance to escort Miss Harriott, with the
result that Hugh and Mary found themselves paired
off to ride home together. Before long he found
himself looking forward to these rides with more anxiety
than he cared to acknowledge, and in a very short
time he was head over ears in love with her.
Any man, being much alone with any
woman in a country house, will fall in love with her;
but a man such as Hugh Gordon, ardent, imaginative,
and very young, meeting every day a woman as beautiful
as Mary Grant, was bound to fall a victim. He
soon became her absolute worshipper. All day
long, in the lonely rides through the bush, in the
hot and dusty hours at the sheep-yards, through the
pleasant, lazy canter home in the cool of the evening,
his fancies were full of her her beauty
and her charm. It was happiness enough for him
to be near her, to feel the soft touch of her hand,
to catch the faint scent that seemed to linger in
her hair. After the day’s work they would
stroll together about the wonderful old garden, and
watch the sunlight die away on the western hills,
and the long strings of wild fowl hurrying down the
river to their nightly haunts. Sometimes he would
manage to get home for lunch, and afterwards, on the
pretext of showing her the run, would saddle a horse
for her, and off they would go for a long ride through
the mountains. Or there were sheep to inspect,
or fences to look at an excuse for an excursion
was never lacking.
For the present he made no sign; he
was quite contented to act as confidant and adviser,
and many a long talk they had together over the various
troubles that beset the manager of a station.
It would hardly be supposed that a
girl could give much advice on such matters, and at
first her total ignorance of the various difficulties
amused him; but when she came to understand them better,
her cool common-sense compelled his admiration.
His temperament was nervous and excitable, and he
let things fret him. She took everything in a
cheery spirit, and laughed him out of his worries.
One would not expect to find many troubles in rearing
sheep and selling their wool; but the management of
any big station is a heavy task, and Kuryong would
have driven Job mad.
The sheep themselves, to begin with,
seem always in league against their owners. Mérinos,
though apparently estimable animals, are in reality
dangerous monomaniacs, whose sole desire is to ruin
the man that owns them. Their object is to die,
and to do so with as much trouble to their owners
as they possibly can. They die in the droughts
when the grass, roasted to a dull white by the sun,
comes out by the roots and blows about the bare paddocks;
they die in the wet, when the long grass in the sodden
gullies breeds “fluke” and “bottle”
and all sorts of hideous complaints. They get
burnt in bush fires from sheer malice, refusing to
run in any given direction, but charging round and
round in a ring till they are calcined. They
get drowned by refusing to leave flooded country,
though hunted with frenzied earnestness.
It was not the sheep so much as the
neighbours whose depredations were drawing lines on
Hugh Gordon’s face. “I wouldn’t
care,” he confided to Miss Grant, “if
they only took a beast or two. But the sheep are
going by hundreds. We mustered five hundred short
in one paddock this month. And there isn’t
a Doyle or a Donohoe cow but has three calves at least,
and two of each three belong to us.”
He dared not prosecute them.
No local jury would convict in face of the hostility
that would be aroused. They had made “alibis”
a special study; the very judges were staggered by
the calmness and plausibility with which they got
themselves out of difficulties.
A big station with a lot of hostile
neighbours is like a whale with the killers round
it; it is open to attack on all sides, and cannot
retaliate. A match dropped carelessly in a patch
of grass sets miles of country in a blaze. Hugh,
as he missed the stock, and saw fences cut and grass
burnt, could only grind his teeth and hope that a lucky
chance would put some of the enemy in his power.
To Mary it seemed incredible that in the nineteenth
century people should be able to steal sheep without
suffering for it; and Hugh soon saw that she was a
true daughter of William Grant, as far as fighting
was concerned. She listened with set teeth to
all stories of depredation and trespass, and they talked
over many a plan together. But though they became
quite friendly their intimacy seemed to make no progress.
To her he was rather the employee than the friend.
In fact he did not get on half so far as did Gavan
Blake, who came up to Kuryong occasionally, and made
himself so agreeable that already his name was being
coupled with that of the heiress. Ellen Harriott
always spoke to Blake when he came to the station,
and gave no sign of jealousy at his attentions to Mary
Grant; but she was waiting and watching, as one who
has been a nurse learns to do. And things were
in this state when an unexpected event put an altogether
different complexion on affairs.