Wilson and Barnes were on their way home from shearing out back in the great scrubs at Beenaway Shed. They had been rescued by Peter M’Laughlan from a wayside shanty where they had fallen, in spite of mutual oaths and past promises, sacred and profane, because they had got wringing wet in a storm on the track and caught colds, and had been tempted to take just one drink.
They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques beautifully when Peter M’Laughlan came along. He rescued them and some of their cash from the soulless shanty keeper, and was riding home with them, on some pretence, because he had known them as boys, because Joe Wilson had a vein of poetry in him—a something in sympathy with something in Peter; because Jack Barnes had a dear little girl-wife who was much too good for him, and who was now anxiously waiting for him in the pretty little farming town of Solong amongst the western spurs. Because, perhaps, of something in Peter’s early past which was a mystery. Simply and plainly because Peter M’Laughlan was the kindest, straightest and truest man in the West—a “white man.”
They all knew Mitchell and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist and a kindly cynic—a “joker” or “hard case” as the bushmen say.
Peter was about fifty and the other three were young men.
There was another man in camp who didn’t count and was supposed to be dead. Old Danny Quinn, champion “beer-chewer” of the district, was on his way out, after a spree, to one of Rouse’s stations, where, for the sake of past services—long past—and because of old times, he was supposed to be working. He had spent his last penny a week before and had clung to his last-hope hotel until the landlord had taken him in one hand and his swag in the other and lifted them clear of the veranda. Danny had blundered on, this far, somehow; he was the last in the world who could have told how, and had managed to light a fire; then he lay with his head on his swag and enjoyed nips of whisky in judicious doses and at reasonable intervals, and later on a tot of mutton-broth, which he made in one of the billies.
It was after tea. Peter sat on a log by the fire with Joe and Jack Mitchell on one side and Jack Barnes on the other. Jack Mitchell sat on the grass with his back to the log, his knees drawn up, and his arms abroad on them: his most comfortable position and one which seemed to favour the flow of his philosophy. They talked of bush things or reflected, sometimes all three together, sometimes by turns.
From the surveyors’ camp:
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn—
The breeze from the west strengthened and the voice was blown away.
“That chap seems a bit sentimental but he’s got a good voice,” said Mitchell. Then presently he remarked, round his pipe: