‘Five-ten; but I think he’d take my single barrel off it. Anyway, I can squeeze a couple of quid out of Phil Lambert for the single barrel.’ (Phil was his bosom chum.)
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Make the best bargain you can.’
He got his own breakfast and made an early start next morning, to get clear of any instructions or messages that Mary might have forgotten to give him overnight. He took his gun with him.
I’d always thought that a man was a fool who couldn’t keep a secret from his wife—that there was something womanish about him. I found out. Those three days waiting for the buggy were about the longest I ever spent in my life. It made me scotty with every one and everything; and poor Mary had to suffer for it. I put in the time patching up the harness and mending the stockyard and the roof, and, the third morning, I rode up the ridges to look for trees for fencing-timber. I remember I hurried home that afternoon because I thought the buggy might get there before me.
At tea-time I got Mary on to the buggy business.
‘What’s the good of a single buggy to you, Mary?’ I asked. ‘There’s only room for two, and what are you going to do with the children when we go out together?’
‘We can put them on the floor at our feet, like other people do. I can always fold up a blanket or ‘possum rug for them to sit on.’
But she didn’t take half so much interest in buggy talk as she would have taken at any other time, when I didn’t want her to. Women are aggravating that way. But the poor girl was tired and not very well, and both the children were cross. She did look knocked up.
‘We’ll give the buggy a rest, Joe,’ she said. (I thought I heard it coming then.) ‘It seems as far off as ever. I don’t know why you want to harp on it to-day. Now, don’t look so cross, Joe—I didn’t mean to hurt you. We’ll wait until we can get a double buggy, since you’re so set on it. There’ll be plenty of time when we’re better off.’
After tea, when the youngsters were in bed, and she’d washed up, we sat outside on the edge of the verandah floor, Mary sewing, and I smoking and watching the track up the creek.