“Now, look alive, and take the mare and water her,” the speaker continues in a calmer voice, “and mind you put a soft pair of hobbles on her. You can let Joe go in the horse paddock. It’s your turn, Dandie, to get the horses to-morrow, and if you keep me a minute after seven o’clock I’ll loosen some of your black hide, swelp me if I don’t.”
The speaker, who is Mr. Wilson Giles, now gets out of the trap, and taking his whip in one hand and a revolver that he always has with him in the buggy in the other, he toddles with the usual short steps of a bushman to the house, just nodding a brief “good-morning” to his niece as he crosses the verandah.
Mr. Giles is, as we have said, an elderly man, but he has rather grown old through his kind of life than the number of his years. A somewhat corpulent man too is he, with a heavy, sensual countenance, on the sides of which, in pale contrast to his scarlet face, are ragged, light-red whiskers. The expression upon this gentleman’s face before strangers is generally either a look of suspicious cunning or an affected one of jolly frankness,—the latter having once formed an ample cloak for many a mean action, but, being now worn threadbare, is less useful than its owner still fondly imagines it to be.
After copious “nips” of whisky and soda-water, Mr. Giles presently throws himself into a chair before the elegantly provisioned table, where his niece and a middle-aged gentleman have already taken their places, and immediately betrays the fact, by the impartial way in which he thrusts his knife into meat, butter, cheese, and preserves, that he is either an eccentric or an ill-educated man.
“Come outside, I want to speak to you,” he grunts to his niece, when he has finished a very rapid repast, quite ignoring throughout the presence of the third person at the table. This is Mr. Cummercropper, the store- and book-keeper of the run, who, being a new arrival in the wilds, has not yet been able to obtain that point of rapid consumption of diet at which most station folk are adepts.
“I will be with you shortly, uncle,” Miss Mundella replies, and proceeds to enter into a conversation upon music and art with the polished storekeeper, who is the very opposite of his highly inflamed “boss.”
Mr. Cummercropper is hopelessly in love with Lileth, like most of the men this young lady thinks it worth while to be civil to. It is a curious feature about Lileth’s male acquaintances that they soon become hot admirers or warm haters of the dark-eyed, haughty young lady.
“Oh, you’ve come at last, have you?” Mr. Giles says, as his niece sweeps to her chair on the verandah, and she knows by experience that his bullying air is the result of something having annoyed or puzzled him, and that probably he will end what he has to say by asking her advice. But her uncle must “blow off his steam,” as he sometimes calls it, on somebody, and a scapegoat must be found before he will become quiet enough to talk sensibly. So Lileth’s first act is to pacify her uncle in the following way.
“Before you begin,” she says, “I want you to have Dina and Lucy beaten. You had better have it done at once, because the Rev. Mr. Harley may be here this afternoon. He said he would try and do his circuit in one month this time.”
“Oh, you needn’t mind Harley,” replies Mr. Giles; “he knows better than to interfere with our ways, Lileth. Besides, he used to ‘dress’ his wife’s little gin down proper at Croydon last year. Even the squatters at the hotel he was stopping at kicked up a row about it. The servant gals told me the little nigger’s back was pretty well scored. What have the gals been doing now?”