"Or let's get blind for the occasion," was the bookkeeper's idea—"every mother's son!"
"That would do," agreed the overseer, "if we got just blind enough. And we might get the blacks from Poonee Creek to come and join the dance."
The overseer was a dapper Victorian with a golden mustache twisted rakishly up and down at either end respectively, like an overturned letter S. He lived up to the name of Smart. The bookkeeper was a servile echo with a character and a face of putty. He had once perpetrated an opprobrious ode to the overseer, and had answered to the name of Chaucer ever since.
Carmichael leaned back to look from one of these worthies to the other, and his spectacled eyes flamed with mordant scorn.
"I suppose you think you're funny, you fellows," said he, and without the oath which was a sign of his good-will, except when he lost his temper with the sheep. "If so, I wish you'd get outside to entertain each other. Since the fellow's coming we shall have to let him come, and the thing is how to choke him off ever coming again without open insult, which I won't allow. A service of some sort we shall have to have, this once."
"I'm on to guy it," declared the indiscreet Chaucer.
"If you do I'll rehearse the men," the overseer promised.
"You idiots!" thundered Carmichael, whose temper was as short as his sight. "Can't you see I weaken on the prospect as much as the two of you stuck together? But the beggar's certain to be a public-school and 'Varsity man: and I won't have him treated as though he'd been dragged up in one of these God-forsaken Colonies!"
Now—most properly—you cannot talk like this in the bush unless you are also capable of confirming the insult with your fists. But Carmichael could; and he was much too blind to fight without his glasses. He was, in fact, the same strenuous character who had set his dogmatic face against the most harmless expletives in dormitory at school, and set it successfully, because Carmichael was a mighty man, whose influence was not to be withstood. His standard alone was changed. Or he was playing on the other side. Yet he had brought a prayer-book with him to the back-blocks. And he was seen studying it on the eve of the episcopal descent.
"He may have his say," observed Carmichael, darkly, "and then I'll have mine."