Mitchell jerked his head approvingly and gave a sound like a sigh and chuckle conjoined, the one qualifying the other.
“I told you you’d get it, Joe,” he said.
“I don’t see how it hits me,” said Joe.
“But it hit all the same, Joe.”
“Well, I suppose it did,” said Joe, after a short pause.
“He wouldn’t have hit you so hard if you hadn’t tried to parry,” reflected Mitchell. “It’s your turn now, Jack.”
Jack Barnes said nothing.
“Now I know that Peter would do anything for a woman or child, or an honest, straight, hard-up chap,” said Mitchell, straightening out his legs and folding his arms, “but I can’t quite understand his being so partial to drunken scamps and vagabonds, black sheep and never-do-wells. He’s got a tremendous sympathy for drunks. He’d do anything to help a drunken man. Ain’t it marvellous? It’s my private opinion that Peter must have been an awful boozer and scamp in his time.”
The other two only thought. Mitchell was privileged. He was a young man of freckled, sandy complexion, and quizzical grey eyes. “Sly Joker” “could take a rise out of anyone on the quiet;” “You could never tell when he was getting at you;” “Face of a born comedian,” as bushmen said of Mitchell. But he would probably have been a dead and dismal failure on any other stage than that of wide Australia.
Peter came back and they sat and smoked, and maybe they reflected along four very different back-tracks for a while.