"Why, it would be lovely!" Mrs. Lester said. "But are you doing nothing yourself?"
"Only killing time. It would be ripping to take you; and there are first-rate runs about Adelaide. As for roads—well, they can teach road-making to any other State I've been in. Like to come, Dick?"
"Rather!" Dick was hopping on one foot. "I say, Mr. Cathcart, how's old Danny?"
"Oh, fitter than ever!" Danny, as a pup, son of a noted cattle dog, had been a farewell present to the departing jackeroo on leaving the Lesters' station. "He's an absolute wonder with cattle. I believe if I sat in a buggy and cracked my whip and told old Danny to go ahead, he'd muster my roughest paddock and not leave a beast behind."
"Father will be jolly glad to hear that," said Dick, solemnly. "He always said Danny would turn out a clinker."
"So you're going to school?" Mr. Cathcart said, glancing at his hat-band and badge. "You'll have to tell me about it presently. Well, Mrs. Lester, may I get the car now?—or, wait a minute, you look a bit tired; how about a cup of tea first? Yes, come along." He led them to a café across the street, and plied them energetically with food.
"Not like the cakes you used to make us at Kurrajong—still, they're better than nothing," he remarked. "Finished already, Dick? Well, shall we go and get the car, and come back here for your mother?"
That seemed a good plan to Dick. He followed the tall figure out into the street, where they dodged precariously round two of Adelaide's flying electric trams, which hurtle down King William Street in fevered haste, and presently found themselves in Rundle Street, a thread-like thoroughfare where the footpath is so narrow that people are forced to walk in large numbers in the roadway.
"Looks as if they'd used all the land for that big street we were in, and found they hadn't left themselves enough over for this," commented Dick.
"It does; and they put all their biggest shops in this tiny lane, so that it's always packed with people. Quaint system," Billy Cathcart said. "Rundle Street generally looks like a sheep race to me—and you fight your way out of it into a street like a hundred-acre paddock."