“I wish Murty could hear you,” said Wally solemnly. Murty O’Toole was head stockman on Billabong, the home in Australia. He was a very great friend.
“Can’t you picture his face!” Norah uttered. “It would be interesting to watch Murty’s expression if dad told him to bring in the cattle from the field when he wanted the bullocks mustered in the home-paddock!”
“He’d give me notice,” said Mr. Linton, firmly. “Neither long service nor affection would keep him!”
“Well, Murty was born in Ireland, though he did come out to Australia when he was a small boy,” Norah said. “So he ought not to feel astonished. But the person I do want to import to England is black Billy. It’s part of Billy’s principles not to show amazement at anything, but I don’t think they’d be proof against a block of traffic in Piccadilly!”
“He’d only say, ‘Plenty!’ ” said Jim, laughing—“that is, if he had any speech left. Poor old Billy, he hates everything but horses, and any motor is a ‘devil-wagon’ to him. A fleet of big red and yellow ’buses would give him nervous prostration.”
“There’s one thing that would scare him more,” Mr. Linton said. “Do you remember the day last winter when we took Norah to Hampton Court, and you chucked a stone at the Round Pond?” He laughed, and every one followed his example.
“And the stone ran along tinkling over the top of the water,” said Norah, recovering. “I never was so taken aback in my life. And all the small children and their nursemaids laughed at me. How was I to know water turned to ice like that? The only frozen thing I had ever seen was ice-cream in Melbourne!”
“Billy never saw ice in his life,” said her father. “He would have thought it very bad magic.”
“He’d have taken to his heels and made for the bush,” said Wally, grinning. “Probably he’d have made himself a boomerang and turned into an up-to-date black Robin Hood, living on those tame old Bushy Park deer.”
“With his headquarters in the Hampton Court Maze!” added Jim. “Wouldn’t it have been an enormous attraction—the halfpenny papers would have called it ‘Wild Life in Quiet Places,’ and London would have run special motor-bus trips to see our Billy!”