"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 Maluka 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 Maluka, 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 Maluka said: "Ann, now I suppose she may
consider herself just 'One of Us.'"
CHAPTER VI
The homestead, standing half-way up the slope that rose from the
billabong, had, after all, little of that "down-at-heels, anything'll-do"
appearance that Mac had so scathingly described. No one could call it a
"commodious station home," and it was even patched up and shabby; but,
for all that, neat and cared for. An orderly little array of one-roomed
buildings, mostly built of sawn slabs, and ranged round a broad oblong
space with a precision that suggested the idea of a section of a street
cut out from some neat compact little village.
The cook's quarters, kitchens, men's quarters, store, meat-house, and
waggon-house, facing each other on either side of this oblong space,
formed a short avenue-the main thoroughfare of the homestead - the centre
of which was occupied by an immense wood-heap, the favourite gossiping
place of some of the old black fellows, while across the western end of
it, and looking down it, but a little aloof from the rest of the
buildings, stood the house, or, rather, as much of it as had been rebuilt
after the cyclone of 1897. As befitted their social positions the forge
and black boys' "humpy" kept a respectful distance well round the
south-eastern corner of this thoroughfare; but, for some unknown reason,
the fowl-roosts had been erected over Sam Lee's sleeping-quarters. That
comprised this tiny homestead of a million and a quarter acres, with the
Katherine Settlement a hundred miles to the north of it, one neighbour
ninety miles to the east, another, a hundred and five to the south, and
others about two hundred to the west.
Unfortunately, Mac's description of the House had been only too correct.
With the exception of the one roughly finished room at its eastern end,
it was "mostly verandahs and promises."
After the cyclone had wrecked the building, scattering timber and sheets
of iron in all directions, everything had lain exactly where it had
fallen for some weeks, at the mercy of the wind and weather. At the end
of those weeks a travelling Chinese carpenter arrived at the station with
such excellent common-sense ideas of what a bush homestead should be,
that he had been engaged to rebuild it.
His plans showed a wide-roofed building, built upon two-foot piles, with
two large centre rooms opening into each other and surrounded by a deep
verandah on every side; while two small rooms, a bathroom and an office,
were to nestle each under one of the eastern corners of this deep
twelve-foot verandah. Without a doubt excellent common-sense ideas; but,
unfortunately, much larger than the supply of timber.
