He swung himself into the saddle and gathered the reins up. “We’ll be back soon after sundown,” he said, “Ye’ll see him then most like.”
The others found Steve waiting for them at the dingo fence of the back paddock. He was sitting smoking, and as the others came near he opened the gate to let them through, closed it behind them, and joined them without any remark.
He rode beside Aleck Gault as they jogged along across the dusty flat, and when he pulled up to light his pipe again Gault pulled up and waited for him.
“What made you swallow breakfast and clear in such a hurry this morning, Steve?” said Gault as they moved on again.
Steve laughed shortly. “I hardly know,” he said; “or rather, it was because I didn’t want to meet that girl this morning, and I guessed she might come out. I hardly know why I didn’t want to see her though.”
“She was out,” said Aleck Gault, “to wish us good morning. But you can’t well avoid her always, Steve, and anyhow, why should you?”
“It was those cursed fools talking last night that upset me,” said Steve, “although I’m a fool to let it. I know I’m no stained-glass-window saint, Aleck, but I don’t quite see that everyone should jump to the conclusion that I can’t behave as anything but a blackguard to a girl. What sort of girl is she really?”
“You’ll like her, Steve,” said Aleck Gault, quietly.
“I hope not,” said Steve, shortly. “For her sake and my own. If I liked her I’d want to be seeing her and talking to her, and I’d do it as often as I wanted, in spite of that mammying lot. And they’d be hanging about and consulting with each other as to whether I was ‘playing straight’ or ‘fooling her,’ as they put it. Pah!” he finished with an expression of disgust.
“For two pins,” he went on presently, “I’d go right in and make myself infernally agreeable and worry the lives out of the lot of them.”