RUBY always remembers the day that Jack came to the station.
It is the twenty-sixth day of December, the day after Christmas, and Ruby, having busied herself about the house most of the morning, in her usual small way, has gone down to the creek to do Fanny and Bluebell’s washing.
There is no reason in the world why those young ladies’ washing should not be undertaken in the privacy of the kitchen, save that Jenny, in an inadvertent moment, has enlightened her young mistress as to the primitive Highland way of doing washing, and has, moreover, shown her a tiny wood-cut of the same, carefully preserved in her large-print Bible.
It is no matter to Ruby that the custom is now almost obsolete. The main thing is that it is Scottish, and Scottish in every respect Ruby has quite determined to be.
Fanny and Bluebell sit in upright waxen and wooden silence against a stone, wrapped each in a morsel of calico, as most of their garments are now immersed in water. Bluebell is a brunette of the wooden-jointed species, warranted to outlive the hardest usage at the hands of her young owner. She has lost the roses from her cheeks, the painted wig from her head, one leg, and half an arm, in the struggle for existence; but Bluebell is still good for a few years more wear. The painted wig Ruby has restored from one of old Hans’ paint-pots when he renewed the station outbuildings last summer; but the complexion and the limbs are beyond her power. And what is the use of giving red cheeks to a doll whose face is liable to be washed at least once a day?
Fanny, the waxen blonde, has fared but little better. Like Bluebell, she is one-legged, and possesses a nose from which any pretensions to wax have long been worn away by too diligent use of soap and water. Her flaxen head of hair is her own, and so are her arms, albeit those latter limbs are devoid of hands. Dolls have no easier a time of it in the Australian bush than anywhere else.
It is not amiss, this hot December morning, to paddle one’s hands in the cooling water, and feel that one is busily employed at the same time. The sun beats down on the large white hat so diligently bent above the running creek. Ruby, kneeling on a large boulder, is busily engaged wringing out Bluebell’s pink calico dress, when a new idea comes to her. She will “tramp” the clothes as they are doing in the picture of the “Highland washing.”
Such an idea is truly delightful, and Ruby at once begins to put it into practice by sitting down and unbuttoning her shoes. But the hand unfastening the second button pauses, and the face beneath the large white hat is uplifted, the brown eyes shining. The sound of horse’s hoofs is coming nearer and nearer.
“It’s dad!” Ruby’s face is aglow now. “He’s come back earlier than he thought.”