Turner stared.
“Good Lord! What’s ten miles, and we haven’t met for years. I must say, old chap, you don’t seem particularly pleased to see an old chum.”
“I—they ain’t so plentiful I can afford to do that. No, I was thinking of going in to the station with you.”
“Right you are, old man, do you? Only we’ll put up at your place for the night—my horse’s pretty well done—and go on in the morning.”
Stanesby said nothing, only turned his horse’s head slightly to the left. Save the red bluffs away to the east there was nothing to mark the change of direction. There was no reason apparently for his choosing one direction rather than another.
They rode in silence, these two who had been college chums and had not met for years. Possibly it was the one man’s good fortune that raised a barrier between them. It was not easy for Turner to talk of present difficulties and troubles when, as Stanesby said, he was going to “cut it all”; it was not easy for him to speak of bygone times when the other man was going back to them, and he would be left here without a prospect of a change. And Stanesby said nothing, he could only think of the great difference between them; and yesterday there was nothing he would have liked better than this meeting with his old friend, which to-day fell flat. No, he had nothing to say. Already their paths lay wide apart.
An hour’s slow riding brought them to the creek Stanesby had spoken of. There was no gentle slope down to the river, the plain simply seemed to open at their feet, and show them the river bed some twenty feet below. Only a river bed about twenty yards wide, but there was no water to be seen, only signs, marked signs in that thirsty land, that water had been there. Down where the last moisture had lingered the grass grew green and fresh, and leafy shrubs and small trees and even tangled creepers made this dip in the plain a pleasant resting-place for the eye wearied with the monotony of the world above it.
“By Jove!” cried Turner, surprised.
“Told you so,” said his companion, “but it ain’t much after all. Fancy calling that wiry stuff grass in England, and admiring those straggly creepers and shrubs. Why we wouldn’t give ‘em house-room in the dullest, deadest corner of the wilderness at home.”
“Lucky beggar!” sighed the other man. “But you see they ‘re all I ‘m likely to have for many a long year to come. Hang it all, man, I bet you ‘d put that shrub there, that chap with the bright red flower, into your hot-house and look after him with the greatest care, or your gardener would for you.”