The Măluka, knew this well, but before he could speak, Mac had seized a little half-grown dog—the most persistent of all the leaping dogs—by her tightly curled-up tail, and, setting her down at my feet, said: “And this is Tiddle’ums,” adding, with another flourishing bow, “A present from a Brither Scot,” while Tiddle’ums in no way resented the dignity. Having a tail that curled tightly over her back like a cup handle, she expected to be lifted up by it.
Then one after the other Mac presented the station dogs: Quart-Pot, Drover, Tuppence, Misery, Buller, and a dozen others; and as I bowed gravely to each in turn Dan chuckled in appreciation: “She’ll do! Told you she was the dead finish.”
Then the introductions over, the Măluka said: “And now I suppose she may consider herself just ‘One of Us.’ ”
Chapter 6
The homestead, standing half-way up the slope that rose from the billabong, had, after all, little of that “down-at-heels, anything’ll-do” appearance that Mac had so scathingly described. No one could call it a “commodious station home,” and it was even patched up and shabby; but, for all that, neat and cared for. An orderly little array of one-roomed buildings, mostly built of sawn slabs, and ranged round a broad oblong space with a precision that suggested the idea of a section of a street cut out from some neat compact little village.
The cook’s quarters, kitchens, men’s quarters, store, meat-house, and waggon-house, facing each other on either side of this oblong space, formed a short avenue—the main thoroughfare of the homestead—the centre of which was occupied by an immense wood-heap, the favourite gossiping place of some of the old black fellows, while across the western end of it, and looking down it, but a little aloof from the rest of the buildings, stood the house, or, rather, as much of it as had been rebuilt after the cyclone of 1897. As befitted their social positions the forge and black boys’ “humpy” kept a respectful distance well round the south-eastern corner of this thoroughfare; but, for some unknown reason, the fowl-roosts had been erected over Sam Lee’s sleeping-quarters. That comprised this tiny homestead of a million and a quarter acres, with the Katherine Settlement a hundred miles to the north of it, one neighbour ninety miles to the east, another, a hundred and five to the south, and others about two hundred to the west.
Unfortunately, Mac’s description of the House had been only too correct. With the exception of the one roughly finished room at its eastern end, it was “mostly verandahs and promises.”