"Rummy," remarked Dick. "I say—what jolly fruit carts!"
"Oh, they're the pride of Adelaide—amongst other things," laughed his companion. "They take some beating, don't they?"
They were drawn up in line along the kerbstone, in the shade of the buildings; carts as spic and span as shining paint and gleaming brass and spotless cleanliness could make them, each in charge of a boy in a white jacket. Their gay little awnings fluttered in the breeze over piles of many-coloured fruit—oranges, red and yellow apples, dark masses of passion fruit, bunches of bananas, strawberries gleaming redly in little baskets lined with leaves. A boy near them was polishing his apples, and the cloth he used was as clean as the apples themselves.
"Well, I'm blessed!" Dick ejaculated. "They don't have carts like that in Melbourne."
"No, you have awful men with barrows that look only fit for pig food, and they tip about fifteen cases of fruit out in a heap, and wheel it about in the sun with the flies sitting on it. Seems a pity," said the Englishman, reflectively. He stopped at a barrow and bought fruit largely, piling up bags in Dick's arms. "Can you manage all those? Come along."
The garage was not far off; a great shed-like building full of odours of petrol and lubricating oil, which are heartsome smells to any boy. Dick poked about among motors big and little while his friend's car was being prepared; and soon they were in it, and worming their way through the crowd in Rundle Street.
"Can you really take a car along here?"
"Oh, it's possible," said Billy. "I'll admit it doesn't look probable. You push people out of the way gently and politely with the bonnet. But it pays to dodge up a side street, if you can, and get into something wider." He slewed round as he spoke, and presently they were running along the broad pavement of North Terrace, and so into King William Street again and to where Mrs. Lester stood awaiting them under a verandah near the café. They slipped away from the city, along well-kept streets, lined with blossoming gardens, until, after a few miles of a dusty road, the hills drew suddenly near, and they turned into a gully where the road ran by the bed of a little creek, following all its windings. The hills towered above them, and they climbed up and up. Here and there came an open stretch, where orchards laden with blossom fell away below them. Now and then the creek made a sudden, sharp bend, enclosing a little flat, gay with tall bulbs. Indeed, all the banks of that little creek were bright with flowers, because when it ran rapidly in the winter it washed down a freight of seeds and roots from the gardens of the houses on the summit. Sometimes tall poplars stood, with their feet in the gurgling water; sometimes a little cottage by the wayside displayed a sign asking wayfarers in for tea, and you could cross the creek by a rustic bridge and sit in a cool summer-house hung with creepers, and eat strawberries and cream in the midst of a delightful garden. The road was steep, and yet so well graded that the car took it without an effort. Even stray cyclists whom they overtook seemed to be climbing its twists and turns without undue exertions. So they came to the top of a long rise called Montacute, where a lonely little tin church perches among the gum trees; and there they sat in its shade, with a myriad birds twittering about them, looking down over the tree-clad slopes to the plains beyond, where Adelaide lay like a chess-board, a network of regular lines and squares. They ate fruit and talked. Billy Cathcart had to learn of a hundred happenings at Kurrajong, and to tell of more than a thousand that had befallen him in his first attempts at running a station unaided. He was a light-hearted person; it afforded him huge amusement to tell of his own mistakes. "Goodness knows, there would have been plenty more of them," he added, "if it hadn't been for the gruelling Mr. Lester gave me on Kurrajong."
"Was it very bad, Billy?" Mrs. Lester laughed.
"Oh, he never meant it to be bad. But the first six months were pretty awful, because I felt such a perfect fool all the time. The trouble was," he grinned, "that I came out from home with an idea that I knew quite a good bit. After I realised that I was mistaken I got on better. But I never thought I would arrive at being a full-blown squatter myself. It seemed to me I'd never get any higher than keeping goats."