"Right, Deirdre!" he replied.
She took her bridle from its nail by the door, and went into the paddock beyond the stable, calling the chestnut. He heard her cry: "Coup lad! coup laddie!" and saw the white-stocking, at her call, come galloping across the newly-green grass, gilded with sunshine. She slipped the bridle over his head, brought him into the yard, saddled him and turned out to the road.
With thoughts of the tragedy that had befallen Mrs. Cameron, as she went along the winding track under the trees, were woven wonderings as to how Donald Cameron's sudden death would affect Davey and the Schoolmaster.
It was on the roadside by the Long Gully that Mr. Cameron had died. The old tree by the gully had fallen at last, and on Donald Cameron. At Rane, while Dan and she were living there, a man had been killed by a falling tree, but it was strange that Davey's father should have died in this way, she thought, he who had been the first settler in the hills.
She wondered if he had ring-barked the tree—score its living green wood—if he had killed it, and in turn it had killed him, pinning him to the earth with its great bulk of dead and rotting timber. She could see Davey's father, heavy, squarely-built, in shabby, dark clothes, lying beneath it, his grey hair blood-dabbled, his face bruised and blackened. The man who had conquered the wilderness had lain there, on the very road he had made, broken, cast aside—a thing that life had done with. It was as if the wilderness had taken its revenge.
She slipped from the chestnut's back in a sunny clearing and gathered a handful of freckled and golden-eyed, white honey-flowers, twisted some tendrils of creepers and blades of ferns among them, and tied them together with a long piece of grass.
When she came in sight of the weatherboard house crouching against the purple wall of the hills, Deirdre realised again what Donald Cameron had done. The cleared paddocks spread round it on every side. An orchard climbing the slope to the left showed in dark leafage against the grey and green of the forest. Cattle dappled the furthest hillside. The barns and sheds and stables behind the house formed a small village. He had made it, cleared the forest for it. He had done all this, she realised, and so much besides, and now he was dead, the man of iron will and indefatigable energy.
There were two or three of the neighbours' carts in Cameron's yard.
Deirdre opened the gate and shut it when she and White Socks had passed through. She hung the chestnut's bridle over a post by the barn, and lifted his saddle.
Speckled fowls and handsome buff and yellow pullets stalked about the yard, pecking industriously even under the legs of the Ross's and Morrison's horses, which, with harness looped back on them, their noses deep in fodder bags, stood beside the carts. In the brilliant sunshine, on a wood-stack, struck against the clear blue sky, a black rooster crowed at intervals.