Dick comes out of the coach-house pulling his forelock. This building is desolate save for a very dilapidated conveyance termed “buggy” in Australia.
“Wantin’ to go for a ride, Miss Ruby?” Dick asks. Dick is Ruby’s cavalier upon those occasions when she desires to ride abroad. “Smuttie’s out in the paddock. I’ll catch him for you if you like,” he adds.
“Bring him round to the gate,” his young mistress says. “I’ll have got on my things by the time you’ve got him ready.”
Smuttie is harnessed and ready by the time Ruby reappears. He justifies his name, being a coal-black pony, rather given over to obesity, but a good little fellow for all that. Dick has hitched his own pony to the garden-gate, and now stands holding Smuttie’s bridle, and awaiting his little mistress’s will.
The sun streams brightly down upon them as they start, Ruby riding slowly ahead. In such weather Smuttie prefers to take life easily. It is with reluctant feet that he has left the paddock at all; but now that he has, so to speak, been driven out of Eden, he is resolved in his pony heart that he will not budge one hair’s-breadth quicker than necessity requires.
Dick has fastened a handkerchief beneath his broad-brimmed hat, and his young mistress is not slow to follow his example and do the same.
“Hot enough to start a fire without a light,” Dick remarks from behind as they jog along.
“I never saw one,” Ruby returns almost humbly. She knows that Dick refers to a bush fire, and that for a dweller in the bush she ought long before this to have witnessed such a spectacle. “I suppose it’s very frightsome,” Ruby adds.
“Frightsome! I should just think so!” Dick ejaculates. He laughs to himself at the question. “Saw one the last place I was in,” the boy goes on. “My! it was grand, and no mistake. Your pa’s never had one here, Miss Ruby; but it’s not every one that’s as lucky. It’s just like”—Dick pauses for a simile—“like a steam-engine rushing along, for all the world, the fire is. Then you can see it for miles and miles away, and it’s all you can do to keep up with it and try to burn on ahead to keep it out. If you’d seen one, Miss Ruby, you’d never like to see another.”
Rounding a thicket, they come upon old Hans, the German, busy in his employment of “ringing” the trees. This ringing is the Australian method of thinning a forest, and consists in notching a ring or circle about the trunks of the trees, thus impeding the flow of sap to the branches, and causing in time their death. The trees thus “ringed” form indeed a melancholy spectacle, their long arms stretched bare and appealingly up to heaven, as if craving for the blessing of growth now for ever denied them.