‘Yes, yes; but what I want to know is, how much am I to send your mother for this?’
‘How much what?’
‘Money, of course, you stupid boy,’ said Mary. ‘You seem a very stupid boy.’
Then he saw what she was driving at. He began to fling his heels convulsively against the sides of his horse, jerking his body backward and forward at the same time, as if to wind up and start some clockwork machinery inside the horse, that made it go, and seemed to need repairing or oiling.
‘We ain’t that sorter people, missus,’ he said. ‘We don’t sell meat to new people that come to settle here.’ Then, jerking his thumb contemptuously towards the ridges, ‘Go over ter Wall’s if yer wanter buy meat; they sell meat ter strangers.’ (Wall was the big squatter over the ridges.)
‘Oh!’ said Mary, ‘I’m SO sorry. Thank your mother for me. She IS kind.’
‘Oh, that’s nothink. She said to tell yer she’ll be up as soon as she can. She’d have come up yisterday evening—she thought yer’d feel lonely comin’ new to a place like this—but she couldn’t git up.’
The machinery inside the old horse showed signs of starting. You almost heard the wooden joints CREAK as he lurched forward, like an old propped-up humpy when the rotting props give way; but at the sound of Mary’s voice he settled back on his foundations again. It must have been a very poor selection that couldn’t afford a better spare horse than that.
‘Reach me that lump er wood, will yer, missus?’ said the boy, and he pointed to one of my ‘spreads’ (for the team-chains) that lay inside the fence. ‘I’ll fling it back agin over the fence when I git this ole cow started.’
‘But wait a minute—I’ve forgotten your mother’s name,’ said Mary.