"Thanks," said Dick.
They looked at each other like two distrustful puppies, and moved off together.
"I say," said Dick, "don't come if it bothers you. I can easy poke round by myself."
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said his entertainer—with a sudden determination that he should do no such thing.
Conversation flagged after that. They went down a wide path, bordered with flowering shrubs, which opened out into a broad, sanded yard behind the kitchen. Here were a series of small buildings, made fly-proof with wire sides, and kept cool by thick roofs projecting so far that they almost formed verandahs. They stood in the shadow of some huge trees.
"What are all these for?" Dick asked.
"Oh, that's the meat house, and that's the dairy, and that's the bacon-curing house. They make salt beef and corned beef there too. That new place is for a 'frigerator thing daddy's just bought."
Dick peeped in through the wire. Rows of hams and sides of bacon hung from whitewashed beams, and there were great tubs and vats where, presumably, many a good bullock found a last resting place in brine. At one end was a kind of table with a ledge all round, where the salting of the meat was done. The floor was cemented; so was that of the dairy, where stood a separator, a churn and a complicated apparatus for cooling milk. Cream and milk, in enamelled buckets, stood on big slate slabs, and all the woodwork was scrubbed to a snowy whiteness.
"We can keep water dripping all round the dairy in the summer, and running over the floor," Merle said proudly. "Daddy fixed it. Could your father do that?"
"I don't know—don't suppose he ever tried," answered Dick, much impressed. "How d'you get the water!"