CHAPTER VII
In ten years, Cameron's had become the biggest clearing in the hills, as it was the oldest. Many others had been made and were scattered throughout the lower ranges overlooking the Wirree plains, though at great distances apart; ten, twelve and sometimes twenty miles lying between neighbouring homesteads.
The hut that had been Donald and Mary Cameron's first home had been broadened by the addition of several extra rooms. Floors had been put down and a wide verandah spread out from them. Every room had a window with four small glass panes. The window-sills, verandah posts and doors had been painted green, and the whole of the house whitewashed. Its bark roof had given place to a covering of plum-coloured slates; there was even a coin or two of grey and golden lichen on them, and the autumn and spring rains drummed merrily on the iron roof of the verandah. Creepers climbed around the stone chimney and the verandah; clematis showered starry white blossom over the roof and about the verandah post.
A little garden, marked-off from the long green fields of spring wheat by a fence of sharp-toothed palings, was filled with bright flowers—English marigolds, scarlet geraniums, pink, yellow and blue larkspurs—and all manner of sweet-smelling herbs—sage, mint, marjoram and lemon thyme. The narrow, beaten paths that ran from the verandah to the gate and round the house were bordered with rosemary. And in the summer a long line of hollyhocks, pink, white and red, and red and white, waved, tall and straight, at one side of the house. The edge of the forest had been distanced so far on every side of the clearing, except one, that the trunks of the trees showed in dim outlines against it, the misty, drifting leafage swaying over and across them. Only on the side on which the track climbed uphill from the road, the trees still pressed against the paddock railings. A long white gate in the fence where the road stopped bore the name Donald Cameron had given his place—"Ayrmuir." It was the name of the estate he had worked on in Scotland when he was a lad. It gave him no end of satisfaction to realise that he was the master of "Ayrmuir," and that his acres were broader than those of the "Ayrmuir" in the old country; not only broader, but his to do what he liked with—his property, unencumbered by mortgage or entail.
On the cleared hillsides about the house, crops of wheat, barley and rye had been sown. An orchard climbed the slope on the left. Behind the old barn and the stables were a row of haystacks. The cowsheds and milking yards were a little further away. Round the haystacks and about the barn a score of the buff and buttermilk-coloured progeny of Mother Bunch, a few speckled chickens, black and white pullets, and miscellaneous breeds of red-feathered, and long-legged, yellow fowls, scratched and pecked industriously.
Donald Cameron farmed his land in the careful fashion of the Lowland Scots. There was perhaps here and there a crooked line in his fields and a rick awry behind the barns. But all was neatness and order, from the beehives which stood with their pointed straw bonnets beneath the apple trees, to the cowsheds, where newly-cut bracken was laid down every day or two for the cows to stand in when they were milked. There was no filth or squelching morass in his cow-yards. The pigs wandered over the hills rooting under the tender grass. Scarcely a straw was allowed to stray between the back of the house and barns. In the feed-room, the harness-room, in every shed and yard, the meticulous precision and passion for order which characterised all that Donald Cameron did, was maintained.
There were changes indoors as well as out. A long straight kitchen, with a bricked floor and small window looking out on to the yard, had been added to the original home. On the east side, two rooms had been built, and a small limewashed shed behind the kitchen served for a dairy. In it, on broad low shelves against the wall, the rows of milk pans, with milk setting in them, were ranged; a small window in the back wall framed a square of blue sky. When Mrs. Cameron was making butter, the sound of the milk in the churn, the rumble and splash of the curded cream, could be heard in the yard. The sweet smell of the new butter and buttermilk hung about the kitchen door.
Ten years of indefatigable energy, of clearing land, breaking soil, raising crops and rearing cattle, doing battle with the wilderness, overcoming all the hardships and odds that a pioneer has to struggle against, had left their mark on Donald Cameron. Every line in his face was ploughed deep.
His expression, gloomy and taciturn as of old, masked an internal concentration, the bending of all faculties to the one end that occupied him. Always a man of few words, as the farm grew and its operations increased, he became more and more silent, talking only when it was necessary and seldom for the sake of companionship or mere social intercourse. His mind was always busy with the movements of cattle, branding, mustering, breeding, buying and selling prices, possibilities of the market. He worked insatiably.
He was reminded of the flight of time only by the growth of his son—a gawky, long-limbed boy.