“But it was me your horse shied at,” returned the other, and fell to petting the frightened animal with soft words and a soothing hand. “I was going to take the liberty of stopping you for a moment.”
“I never saw you,” said David; “it was that dark, and I was that busy thinking. What is it I can do for you? The horse 'll stand steady now, thank you, if you'll come this way.”
The wayfarer came round to the buggy wheels and stood still, feeling in all his pockets before answering questions. The near lamp shot its rays upon a broad, deep chest, and showed a pair of hairy hands searching one pocket after another. The rays reached as high as a scarlet neckcloth, but no higher, so that the man's face was not very easily visible; and David was only beginning to pick out of the night a heavy moustache, and a still heavier jaw, when from between the two there came the gleam of teeth, and the fellow was laughing a little and swearing more. He had given up his search, and stood empty-handed under the lamp.
“I'm not a bushranger,” said he, “but you might easily think me one.”
“Why so?” asked David.
“Because I stopped you to ask for a match to light my pipe, and now I'm hanged if I can find my pipe in any of my pockets; and it was the best one ever I smoked,” said the man, with more of his oaths.
“That's a bad job,” said David, sympathetically, in spite of a personal horror of bad language, which was one of his better peculiarities.
“A bad job?” cried the man. “It would be that if I'd lost my pipe, but it's a damned sight worse when it's a girl that goes and shakes it from you, and she the biggest little innocent you ever clapped eyes on. Yet she must have shook it. Confound her face!”
He was feeling in his pockets again, but as unsuccessfully as before. The farmer inquired whether he was on his way back to Melbourne, and suggested it was a long walk.
“It is so,” said the man; “but it's a gay little town when you get there, is Melbourne—what?”