“What ’ud I do, picnickin’ on a burnt log? An’ no one to look after the master if he wanted anything. No, thanks. You’d better boil the billy out there; if there’s men workin’ they’d be glad of a drink of tea. I’ll fix it—you go on an’ get ready.” And when the iron-greys were harnessed, she came out with a huge billy and a package of food almost as huge. She held the gate open as they drove through—tall, erect, and bony, in her stiffly-starched print dress, her hair screwed back from her knobby forehead.
“Good-bye, Sarah, old girl!” sang out Billy. “Wish you were coming!”
“I know when I’m well orf!” responded Sarah, loftily. But her eyes were very tender.
There was no buggy track across the paddock: the express-waggon bumped and rattled over the bare, uneven ground, and the water splashed from under the lid of the billy with such persistence that it seemed as if there would be very little left to boil by the time they reached their journey’s end. The cattle were all back in their feeding-ground—the gate into the next paddock tied back, in case a fire should spring up. They looked sleepily at the rattling buggy, failing to recognize, in the small boys sitting in the back, with dangling legs, the two demons who, only yesterday, had chased them through the timber with horrid yells.
Moncrieff’s paddock stretched away to the east, blackened and bare. Smoke rose lazily from the charred timber on the ground, but only one burning tree still stood erect. There was a steady sound of chopping near its base, where could be seen a man, whose axe rose and fell with machine-like regularity. As Jo pulled up the horses, a warning crack came from the tree, and he stepped quickly backwards, looking up. Slowly the tree swayed to one side, seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then toppled lazily over, coming to earth with a crash. It broke into three pieces, showers of sparks and burning fragments rising from it. The greys leaped beneath Jo’s restraining hand; and then, deciding that they had made a mistake, settled to calmness again.
“That’s Mr. Conlan,” Jo said. “Isn’t he a brick, working here like this—and on Sunday, too! And there’s Mr. Moncrieff. We must send them home—if they’ll go. Come on, Jean, and we’ll get the horses out.”
They unharnessed the greys and tied them in a patch of shade, while Billy and Rex hunted for sticks to boil the billy. Moncrieff came riding towards them as they returned to the buggy.
“Good-day, Mrs. Weston. Nice and hot, as usual, isn’t it?”
“It was hotter for you, yesterday, Mr. Moncrieff, I believe,” Mrs. Weston answered, laughing. “You have had a great burn.”
“Yes, thoroughly satisfactory, since it didn’t finish by getting the Emu Plains grass,” said Moncrieff, a burly man with a keen, rugged face. “I certainly was afraid that it was going to. It has done me hundreds of pounds worth of good, in clearing up my paddock.”