I looked down—about the first time I had looked down on him—and there was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two half-crowns in it.
“Oh, that’s all right, Bob,” I said, and I dropped in half a crown.
There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word, who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town. There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and turned out by their landlord.
“This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe,” said one of the shearers. “Them ——s has made enough out of us coves. They’ve got plenty of stuff, don’t you fret. Let ’em go to ——! I’m blanked if I give a sprat.”
“They ain’t got their fares to Sydney,” said the Giraffe. “An’, what’s more, the little ’un is sick, an’ two of them has kids in Sydney.”
“How the —— do you know?”
“Why, one of ’em come to me an’ told me all about it.”
There was an involuntary guffaw.
“Look here, Bob,” said Billy Woods, the rouseabouts’ secretary, kindly. “Don’t you make a fool of yourself. You’ll have all the chaps laughing at you. Those girls are only working you for all you’re worth. I suppose one of ’em came crying and whining to you. Don’t you bother about ’em. You don’t know ’em; they can pump water at a moment’s notice. You haven’t had any experience with women yet, Bob.”
“She didn’t come whinin’ and cryin’ to me,” said the Giraffe, dropping his twanging drawl a little. “She looked me straight in the face an’ told me all about it.”