Hardcastle finished his drink with a resigned smile, and stood on the veranda to receive the intruders.
"After all, it will stave off the reaction I began to feel the moment they had turned their backs," said he. "Well, well, well! I thought I'd just got rid of you fellows, and back you come like base coin!"
"You mustn't blame us," said the sergeant, first to dismount. "We couldn't know that Superintendent Cairns had been sent up from Sydney, much less that we should ride right into him in your horse-paddock!"
The squatter had stepped down from the veranda with polite alacrity.
"Glad to see you, Mr. Cairns," said he. "I only wish you had come before."
The creature in the plain clothes looked about him with a dry smile, and a sharp eye upon the younger men and the empty glasses, as he and the sergeant accompanied Hardcastle to the veranda, while Tyler took charge of the three horses. The fame of Cairns had travelled before him to Rosanna, but none had been prepared for a figure so weird or for a countenance so forbidding and malign. His manners were equally uncouth. He shook his bent head to decline refreshment; he pointedly ignored a generalization of Hardcastle's about the crime; and when he spoke, it was in a gratuitously satirical style of his own.
"May I ask, Mr. Hardcastle, if you are the owner or the manager of this lodge in a howling wilderness?"
"I'm sorry to say I am both."
"I appreciate the sorrow. I failed to discern a single green blade as I came along."
"We depend on salt-bush and the like."