'Armed year—year of the struggle!
No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year.
Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipped cannon—
I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.'
Cameron was in Sydney again—the first time for seven long years. He had come down almost a month before the date upon which the Utopia was advertised as due, with the desperate hope of getting something to do that might yield him enough money to buy a new suit.
Up on the selection he wore soft shirts and old tweed trousers almost all the time.
When it came to a question of finding him starched shirts and a decent suit and hat in which to face his wife, Hermie and Miss Browne were nonplussed.
Finally they discovered one suit that had not been taken, piecemeal, to work in; but the moths had also discovered it. Sponge and press and darn as Hermie might, it still looked disreputable; the shirts were ragged, there was no hat that was not hopelessly spoiled with the sun and dust and rain.
It forced itself upon Cameron that there was but one thing to do—he must borrow a few pounds from some one.
And there was but one man he knew who would lend it to him—Mortimer Stevenson. Hermie had never told her secret. He groomed Tramby up a little, and put on a linen coat and hat, and set out in the direction of Coolooli. He hoped he might not meet the father; he was quite conscious of the fact that the business-like, successful old man looked upon him as a shiftless beggar. They knew each other slightly; Stevenson had ridden in two or three times when passing the selection, and stayed for an hour or two talking stock and crops and the war. Once or twice Cameron had been for dinner to Coolooli while shearing was on, and there were chances to learn successful methods. But he shrank with all his soul from encountering the old man this morning.
Two or three aboriginal women were coming back from a journey to the house, cloths full of stores and broken food slung over their shoulder. Stevenson forty years ago had had to break up a big camp of them on the land he had just taken up, and drive them farther west. Ever since he had not felt justified in refusing food to any of their colour.
Cameron stopped the women, to ask if they had seen Mortimer riding away that morning.
'I say, Mary,' he said, 'you been see that one Mr. Mortimer?'