“I wonder where poor Jim is?” the mother moaned, rocking the baby, and with two of those great, silent tears starting from her haggard eyes.
“Oh don’t start about Jim again, Ellen,” said her sister impatiently. “He can take care of himself. You were always rushing off to meet trouble half-way—time enough when they come, God knows.”
“Now, look here, Ellen,” put in Uncle Abe, soothingly, “he was up in Queensland doing well when we last heerd of him. Ain’t yer never goin’ to be satisfied?”
Jim was evidently another and a younger uncle, whose temperament from boyhood had given his family constant cause for anxiety.
The father sat smoking, resting his elbow on his knee, bunching up his brush of red whiskers, and looking into the fire—and back into his own foreign past in his own foreign land perhaps: and, it may be, thinking in his own language.
Silence and smoke for a while; then the mother suddenly straightened up and lifted a finger:
“Hush! What’s that? I thought I heard someone outside.”
“Old Poley coughin’,” said Uncle Abe, after they’d listened a space. “She must be pretty bad—oughter give her a hot bran mash.” (Poley was the best milker.)
“But I fancied I heard horses at the sliprails,” said the mother.
“Old Prince,” said Uncle Abe. “Oughter let him into the shed.V