The man pulled some handfuls of gum-leaves from a tree by the roadside and felt in his pocket for his matches. A thin bar crossed each bullock’s back, and suspended from it on either side was a small iron pot, where a fire, generally of bark and pungent leaves, burnt ceaselessly to keep off the mosquitoes.
“I’ve never seen them worse,” said the man with a groan; “I’ve come five miles in a curtain of ’em—I suppose I’ve been so busy flicking myself I didn’t notice.”
“You should see them in our house,” said the boy.
“You should ha’ seen them on the station,” said the man.
“Didn’t I?” said the boy. “Wasn’t I there for the letters this morning? The train was an hour late again, and the men who were waiting for it made a fire on the platform and stood in the smoke.”
“It’s the most God-forsaken hole on the face of the globe,” said the man. “I’m cutting it—off on Monday; been here a month, and that’s four weeks too much. Well—so-long.”
He cracked his long whip and the team lumbered wearily off on its journey again.
“Clif,” called a tired voice from a side window, “are you there, Clif? I wish you’d come and take baby for me.”
[55]
]“I’m not there,” muttered Clif to himself, “I’m at the front. I mightn’t have heard.” He slipped off the gate and glided away into a stretch of scrubby bush adjacent. Then with a defiant look at the windows of the house behind he stalked off to his own particular den, or what his mother called his “sulking-place,” a hollow, hidden against the bank where the colliery railway ran. He flung himself down and kicked monotonously with his boot-heels on the pebbly ground. It was one of the days that came so often to him, when he was in fierce revolt with his surroundings, and wished himself or else all the rest of the world dead and buried.
He was a thin boy, between twelve and thirteen; his hair had a crisp wave in it that lent height to his forehead; his eyes were a deep blue, sombre, even sullen at times in expression; his mouth accentuated the sullenness.