"We heard about your Dad and your Gran. Fancy! But I wish Monica had come with you. She was such a little demon at school. I'm fair longing to see her."
"She's not the only one of you that's a demon!" said Tom, in the correct tone of banter, putting over his horse and drawing to the girl's side, and becoming very manly for her benefit. "An' what's wrong with us, that you aren't glad to see us?"
"Oh, you're all right," said the cousin. "But a girl of your own age is more fun, you know."
"Well, I don't happen to be a girl of your own age," said Tom. "Just by accident, I'm a man. But come on. There's some roughs about. We might just as well get out of their way."
He trotted alongside the damsel, leaving Jack to bring the pack-horse. Jack didn't mind.
II
So they went on, receiving a rough and generous hospitality from, one or another of Tom's or Jack's relations, of whom there were astonishingly many, along the grand bush track to Geraldton. If they weren't direct relations, they were relations by marriage, and it served just as well. There were the Brockmans, there were the Browns, and Gales, and Davises, Edgars and Conollys, Burgesses, Cooks, Logues, Cradles, Morrises, Fitzgeralds and Glasses. Families united by some fine-drawn connection or other; and very often much more divided than united, by some very plain-drawn feud. Their names like brooks trickled across the land, and you crossed and re-crossed. You would lose a name entirely: like the Brockman name. Then suddenly it reappeared as Brackman, and "Oh yes, we're cousins!"
"Who isn't cousin!" thought Jack.
Some of them had huge tracts of land fenced in. Some had little bits of poor farms. Sometimes there were deserted farms.
"And to think," said Tom, "that none of them is my own mother's relations. All Dad's, or else Ma's. Mostly Ma's."