The nice-mannered Miss Snook took turn with her mama in this palace of Circe. She was extremely "nice" in her manners, for the "boss" owned the team, the pub, and the boarding-house at which you stayed so long as you could pay the outrageous prices. So Miss Snook, never familiarised into Lucy, for she wouldn't allow it, oscillated between the closed oven of the boarding-house and the open oven of the pub.
Father—or the "boss"—had been a barber in Sydney. Now he cooked in the boarding-house, and drove the team. "Mother" had been the high-born daughter of a chemist; she had ruined all her prospects of continuing in the eastern "swim" by running away with the barber, now called "boss." However, she took her decline in the social scale with dignity, and allowed no familiarities. Her previous station helped her to keep up her prices.
"We're not, y'understand, Mr. Grant, a Provident concern, as some foot-sloggers seem to think us. We're doing our best to provide for Lucy, against she wants to get married, or in case she doesn't."
She and Lucy did the washing and cleaning between them, but their efforts were nominal. Boss' cooking left everything to be desired. The place was a perfect Paradise.
"We know a gentleman when we see one, Mr. Grant, and we're not going to throw our only child away on a penniless waster."
Jack wanted loudly to proclaim himself a penniless waster. But Tom and he had a pact, not to say anything about themselves, or where they came from. They were just "looking round."
And in that heat, the plump, perspiring, cotton-clad Lucy thought that Tom seemed more amenable than Jack. Poor Tom seemed to fall for it, and Jack had to look on in silent disgust.
There was even a ghastly, gruesome wedding. Neither of the boys could bear to think of it. Even in the stupefaction of that heat, when the brain seems to melt, and the will degenerates, and nothing but the most rudimentary functions of the organism called man, continue to function, even then a sense of shame overpowered them. But Tom was in a trance, pig-headed as any of Circe's swine. He continued in the trance for about a week after his so-called marriage. Then he woke up from the welter of perspiration, rum, and Lucy in an amazed horror, and the boys escaped.
The nightmare of this town—it was called "Honeysuckle"—was able to penetrate Tom's most nonchalant mood, even when he was hundreds of trackless miles away. The young men covered their tracks carefully. The Snooks knew nothing but their names. But a name, alas, is a potent entity in the wilds.
They covered their tracks and disappeared again. But even so, an ancient letter from Wandoo followed them to a well-digging camp. It was from Monica to Tom, but it didn't seem to mean much to either boy.