“So it would,” said the boss, laughing; “so it would—as long as it stayed on the banks. But the first time the river came down in flood——” he finished the sentence with a significant sweeping gesture.
They drove in through the homestead gate, and Ess’s eyes sparkled at the sight of trim green hedges and vivid green grass. The contrast was the more pleasant after the heat and dryness and dust of the arid wastes they had been driving over.
“Oh, I’m so glad I came, Mr. Sinclair,” she cried. “It is beautiful.”
“You’ll understand maybe how proud I am of it,” said the old boss, lovingly looking round, “and what it would mean to me to lose it.”
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “You won’t—you can’t lose it.”
“Well, well, I’m glad to have it to show you while it’s still my own,” he said. “Now jump down. There’s the housekeeper at the door. She’ll show you your room and make you comfortable. And you can have a real bath and a shower, and maybe Ah Sing will let you walk in the garden and pluck a flower or two.” He nodded towards the Chinaman who was spraying the grass with a hose, and oddly enough the thought in Ess’s mind as she watched the sparkling shower fall was the pity that such beautiful water should be wasted—she would have liked to drink it all.
Ess stayed at the home station for over a week, and the old boss and the housekeeper made much of her, and petted her, and let her ask questions to her heart’s content.
Indeed it is doubtful if the boss did not get more pleasure from answering her questions and showing her the house than she had from asking them and being shown it.
He took her round the outside and pointed out the walls made of concrete—concrete brought up in bags from the coast, and carried by the station waggons the long miles from the railway to the township, and the township to the station, and mixed and moulded in moulds made on the station, and built in walls by his own men’s labour. Everything had been done under his own direction and planning and eye. He had drawn his own plans, his own men had hewn the timber from his own trees, and sawn them in the saw-pit by hand. They had dug the foundations, and laid the floors, and built the walls, and cut joists and rafters, and put the roof on; they had made and fitted every door and window, and done their own plumbing and glazing and painting and papering—only in one or two of the bedrooms was there any wall paper in the house, though; the other rooms were walled with beautiful light-coloured native woods. A considerable amount of the furniture was station made, and, looking at it, Ess could hardly believe that it had not been turned out by a city factory. There were no carpets on the wood floors; they were merely stained, and scattered thick with rugs made from the black and white skins of the station sheep, or of the foxes trapped and killed on the run. The wide hall from which the living rooms opened was hung round with native weapons, boomerangs, and spears, and waddies, the huge head and sweeping horns of an immense bull, the masks and brushes of foxes, the skins of kangaroos, wild dogs, black swans, and snakes.
This hall was the boss’s chiefest pride, and he told Ess endless tales of the trophies round the walls; of how much he had paid for that ram, whose head looked down on them—“the first stud ram I bought, Miss Lincoln, and I’d only about twelve hundred sheep then. I’ve shorn over sixty thousand in one shearing since then”—the ancestry for generations back of the prize bull; the tale of the riding down and killing of that fox; the long hunts and innumerable traps and poison baits it took to kill that dingo; this skin of a snake that had been killed when they were clearing the ground for the foundations of the house (“he bit me too, and I’d a bad day from the bite I tell you. And I said I’d have his skin, and hang it over where he was killed; and so I did—right under where we stand was the spot”).