He got up too and stood, his back against the veranda railings.
'Lady Bridget, you mustn't be angry with me. I suppose I am a little off my balance, you must remember that this is—for me, a rather staggering experience.'
'Shall we go for a ride?' she asked suddenly. 'I don't suppose you have much idea of what a wild western station is like.'
'Oh, I'm fairly well acquainted with life on big pastures,' he answered lightly, taking her cue. 'You would be surprised, perhaps, at the list of my qualifications as an "out-back squatter."—I'm a bit of a rancher—had one in the Argentine—a bit of a doctor—a bit of a policeman—I was in charge once of a constabulary force out in British Guiana. That's where I got a rise off Harris—a bit of a law breaker, too—in fact a bit of everything. Yes, I should enjoy a ride round here with you immensely.'
'Then do you mind looking for Mr Ninnis, the overseer, you know.'
'Yes, I know Ninnis. Had a yarn—as he'd say—with him last night while your husband was talking to Harris. Ninnis doesn't get on well with Harris—another point of sympathy. We're quite friends already. Ninnis and I—he's been in South America, too.'
'You'll find him somewhere about the Bachelors' Quarters, and I'll go and put on my habit,' she said.
Lady Bridget appeared as Maule and Ninnis were finishing saddling the horses. Ninnis had stayed near the head station, and was keeping a sharp look-out for bush fires, he said. Otherwise, there appeared to be no elements of disquiet. Lady Bridget noticed with surprise that Ninnis seemed to defer to Maule, which was not his usual attitude towards strangers. She attributed this to a community of experiences in South America, and also to Maule's undoubted knack of managing men.
CHAPTER 2
They rounded the lagoon and skirted the gidia scrub. Maule was on a Moongarr horse, Bridget rode a fiery little chestnut. Maule had already had opportunity to admire the famous O'Hara seat. They had hunted together once or twice on the Campagna, that winter when they had met in Rome. It was difficult to avoid retrospect, but Bridget seemed determined to keep it within conventional limits. They found plenty, however, to talk about in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was the effort to throw off the load on her heart that made Bridget gaily confiding. She drew humorous pictures of the comic shifts, the almost tragic hardships of life on the Leura—how she had been left servantless—until Ninnis had got up Maggie from the Lower Leura—when the Chinamen decamped during the gold rush. She described the chivalrous SUNDOWNER who had on one occasion helped her through a week's washing; and Zack Duppo the horsebreaker, whose Christmas pudding had been a culinary triumph, and the loyalty of faithful Wombo, who had done violence to all his savage instincts in acting as house-servant until the advent of the Malay boy Kuppi. She told of her first experience of a summer out West. The frying of eggs in the sun on a sheet of corrugated zinc, so intense was the heat. The terror of snakes, centipedes, scorpions. The plagues of flies and white ants. Then how, during the servantless period, in utter loneliness and Colin's enforced absence at the furthest out-station she had had an attack of dengue fever, and no woman within forty miles of her.