“Then you’ll be living on gum leaves most of the time!” retorted Jim. “Perhaps you might get a monkey-bear if you were lucky.”
“I could stand devilled bear very well indeed, just now,” responded his friend. “Never met such hungry air in my life—in the words of the poet, there’s nothing in the world I couldn’t chew!”
“Well, that may be the poet’s opinion, but you’re not going to chew anything here until camp is fixed,” said Mr. Linton, laughing. “Jean has us all beaten—her saddle is the first off.”
“Jean will get beastly unpopular if she’s not careful,” said Wally, favouring the energetic Jean with as much of a scowl as his cheerful countenance would permit. “These horribly-good people nearly always come to a bad end, and nobody loves them!” A tirade that left Jean quite unmoved, as she inquired of Mr. Linton if Nan were to be hobbled?
Besides the tent, there was a “wurley” to be put up to-night. The boys were inclined to scorn this at first, but found later on that they were glad of its shelter, for the keen mountain air was very different to the milder temperature of the plains, and their stock of blankets was not large. They built it of interlaced boughs, thick with leaves, and when finished it looked most inviting. By that time Jean and Norah had tea ready, and the camp fire was glowing redly in a rocky corner.
They sat about it afterwards, singing every chorus they could remember, to a spirited accompaniment by Wally on the penny whistle. The whistle was pitched in a higher key than Nature had rendered possible for most of the singers—a circumstance which did not at all impair the cheerfulness of the quartet, though Mr. Linton threatened to flee into the fastnesses of the bush if the “obbligato” were not discontinued. Black Billy, washing cups at the spring, and gathering kindling wood for the morning fire, grinned all the time in sympathy with the freshness and merriment of the young voices. They rang out cheerily, their echoes dying away on the lonely slopes. Never had such sounds disturbed the brooding silence of old Ben Athol.
To David Linton, lying awake in his “wurley” in the moonlight, gazing dreamily out at a star that trembled in the west, it seemed that the last chorus still lingered on the night air:—
“Wrap me up in my stock-whip and blanket,
And say a poor buffer lies low—lies low,
Where the dingoes and crows can’t molest me,