'Oh! what beauties! I'd like to go and make friends with them.'
He was delighted. 'Good 'uns, ain't they? But wait and make friends when you're behind 'em. We've twenty-five miles to do before sundown. Got your traps fixed up? That's right. Here, Bill, take her ladyship's bag and stow it safely at the back of the buggy. Handle it gingerly—it's full of silver and glass fallals—not what we're much used to on the Leura.'
The stockman grinned and carried the dressing-bag—one of Sir Luke's and Lady Tallant's wedding presents—as if it were dynamite. Colin seemed anxious to impress his wife's dignity upon her new subjects. She felt still more like a queen of comic opera. He helped her into her dust cloak, paid the bill, cut short the landlady's sulky apologies—she had done her hair and recovered herself a little. Then he settled Lady Bridget into the buggy after the manner of a bush courtier—her feet on a footstool, the rug over her knees, a cushion at her back. His whole air seemed to say:
'This is the Queen, and I, the King, expect that proper homage be paid her.'
CHAPTER 6
The loafers at the bar all came out to see the start. The family on the top of the bullock-dray peered forth from under the tilt. The barkeeper shouted, 'Good luck to you and your lady, Mr McKeith.' The drunken reprobates, awakened from their slumber on the boards, called out, too, 'Goo-luksh!' There was an attempt at a cheer, but before McKeith had got out his answering, 'Thank ye—Good day, mates,' a shower of opprobrious epithets rained upon him from a little band of discontented bush rowdies—the advance guard of that same Union delegate who had come up with them in the train from Leuraville.
Three of these men lurched on to the bar veranda, and, so to speak, took the stage. In front was a stumpily-built bullock driver with a red, truculent face, a ragged carrotty beard and inflamed narrow-ridded eyes. A little to the rear stood a lanky, muscular bushman in very dirty moleskins, with a smooth loose-lipped face, no eyelashes, and a scowling forehead, who was evidently the worse for drink; next to him, a shorter man of the drover type, older, eagle-beaked and with sinister, foxy eyes. This one hailed McKeith.
'Yah! Look at him and his spanking team! What price honest labour, you blamed scab of a squatter? Just you wait a bit. It'll be our turn soon to burn all you blanked capitalists off the Leura.'
The lanky bushman took up the jeering note.
'Pretty flash turn-out, ain't it! My word, you think yourself a bloated fine gentleman now you've married into the British hairystocracy, don't you, Mister Colin McKeith? You can take it from us, boys, he's the meanest cuss that ever downed a harmless nigger.... Ask him what the twenty-five notches on his gun stand for?'