‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come, Mr Ellis,’ she said, giving my hand a grip. ‘Walter—Mr Head—has been speaking to me about you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit down by the fire, Mr Ellis; tea will be ready presently. Don’t you find it a bit chilly?’ She shivered. It was a bit chilly now at night on the Bathurst plains. The table was set for tea, and set rather in swell style. The cottage was too well furnished even for a lucky boss drover’s home; the furniture looked as if it had belonged to a tony homestead at one time. I felt a bit strange at first, sitting down to tea, and almost wished that I was having a comfortable tuck-in at a restaurant or in a pub. dining-room. But she knew a lot about the Bush, and chatted away, and asked questions about the trip, and soon put me at my ease. You see, for the last year or two I’d taken my tucker in my hands,—hunk of damper and meat and a clasp-knife mostly,—sitting on my heel in the dust, or on a log or a tucker-box.
There was a hard, brown, wrinkled old woman that the Heads called ‘Auntie’. She waited at the table; but Mrs Head kept bustling round herself most of the time, helping us. Andy came in to tea.
Mrs Head bustled round like a girl of twenty instead of a woman of thirty-seven, as Andy afterwards told me she was. She had the figure and movements of a girl, and the impulsiveness and expression too—a womanly girl; but sometimes I fancied there was something very childish about her face and talk. After tea she and the Boss sat on one side of the fire and Andy and I on the other—Andy a little behind me at the corner of the table.
‘Walter—Mr Head—tells me you’ve been out on the Lachlan river, Mr Ellis?’ she said as soon as she’d settled down, and she leaned forward, as if eager to hear that I’d been there.
‘Yes, Mrs Head. I’ve knocked round all about out there.’
She sat up straight, and put the tips of her fingers to the side of her forehead and knitted her brows. This was a trick she had—she often did it during the evening. And when she did that she seemed to forget what she’d said last.
She smoothed her forehead, and clasped her hands in her lap.
‘Oh, I’m so glad to meet somebody from the back country, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘Walter so seldom brings a stranger here, and I get tired of talking to the same people about the same things, and seeing the same faces. You don’t know what a relief it is, Mr Ellis, to see a new face and talk to a stranger.’
‘I can quite understand that, Mrs Head,’ I said. And so I could. I never stayed more than three months in one place if I could help it.
She looked into the fire and seemed to try to think. The Boss straightened up and stroked her head with his big sun-browned hand, and then put his arm round her shoulders. This brought her back.