They all went out with her to the gate, where her superb, high-tempered horse pawed the gravel, and champed upon his bit. Jim sent her springing to the saddle from his horny palm like a bird let out of it, and they watched in silence while she crossed two paddocks, leaped two sets of slip-rails, and disappeared as a small dot of white handkerchief from the sun-suffused landscape.
"What riding!" Guthrie Carey ejaculated, under his breath.
"She's the best horsewoman in the country," Jim Urquhart commented slowly, after a still pause.
He was a slow—to some people a dull and heavy—man, who talked little, and less of Deborah Pennycuick than of any subject in the world—his world.
"And what a howling beauty!" the sailor added, in the same whisper of awe.
Again the bushman spoke, muttering deeply in his beard: "She is as good as she is beautiful."
Mrs Urquhart took her levelled hand from her eyes, and turned to contribute her testimony.
"There, Mr Carey, goes the flower of the Western District. You won't find her match amongst the best in England. I was with her mother when she was born—not a soul else—and put her into her first clothes, that I helped to make; and a bonny one she was, even then, with her black eyes, that stared up at me as much as to say: 'Who are you, I'd like to know?' Dear, it seems like yesterday, and it's nigh twenty years ago. All poor Sally Pennycuick's girls are good girls, and the youngest is going to be handsome too. Rose, the third, is not at all bad-looking; poor Mary—I don't know who she takes after. The father was the one with the good looks; but Sally was a fine woman too. Poor dear old Sally! I wish she was here to see that girl."
Mrs Urquhart and Mrs Pennycuick, plain, brave, working women of the rough old times, wives of high-born husbands, incapable of companioning them as they companioned each other, had been great friends. On them had devolved the drudgery of the pioneer home-making without its romance; they had had, year in, year out, the task of 'shepherding' two headstrong and unthrifty men, who neither owned their help nor thanked them for it—the inglorious life-work of so many obscure women—and had strengthened each other's hands and hearts that had had so little other support.
"Mrs. Pennycuick—she is not living, I presume?" Guthrie enticed the garrulous lady to proceed.