"We're Englishmen who have experienced the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with a vengeance. I suppose you would call us beach-combers, now I come to think of it. However, if you can give us work, I can promise you we'll do it, and do it faithfully. If you can't—well, perhaps you'll give us a meal a piece, just to put strength into us for the swim back."
"Well, I'll think about it. In the meantime we must get your mate up to the station. Jimmy, you take his head, you—by the way, what's your name?"
"Ellison—Cuthbert Ellison."
"Very well then, Ellison, you take his heels. That's right, now bring him along."
Between them, and led by the woman, they carried Murkard up the path to the station. Arriving at a hut, near that from which the Kanaka had been summoned, she stopped, took a key from a bunch in her pocket, unlocked the door, and threw it open. It was small, but scrupulously clean. Two camp bedsteads were ranged beside the wall, furnished with coarse blue blankets; a tin wash-hand basin stood on a box at the far end, alongside it a small wooden table, with a six-inch looking-glass above that again.
"You can occupy this hut for the present. Put him down on that bed, so! Before I take it away give him a drop more brandy. That's right. I think he'll do now. If you don't want a spell yourself you'd better come with me."
Ellison arranged Murkard's head upon his pillow, glanced almost unconsciously at himself in the square of glass, and then followed her out of the hut, and across the yard to the veranda opposite. Arriving there she seated herself in a hammock, that swung across the corner, and once more looked him up and down.
"I don't think you need have told me you were an Englishman!" she said at length.
"Why not?" he asked, without any real curiosity. He was watching the shapely feet and ankles swinging beneath the hammock.
"Because I could see it for myself. Your voice is the voice of an Englishman, your face is the face of an Englishman, and, if I wanted any further proof, I should convince myself by your walk. Have you ever noticed that your countrymen" (she spoke as if Australians were not Englishmen), "Britishers, I mean, walk in quite a different fashion from our men? You haven't noticed it, I see. Well, I'm afraid, then, you haven't cultivated the faculty of observation."