'I am not surprised,' repeated Terence. 'Few fellows would have been as patient, I think. Wait a moment and I'll get my hat.'
He was back again almost immediately, and, linking arms with George, drew him round the house to the front gate.
These two had been friends from earliest childhood, though both in appearance and disposition they differed remarkably from one another. George Haughton, tall and commanding, finely made, with well-knit, muscular frame, fair, curling hair, and Saxon-blue eyes, was the very type of a healthy young Englishman. The other, Terence Moore, was blue-eyed also; but his shock of red hair, his densely freckled skin, the tilt of his nose, and his wide smiling mouth as plainly betrayed his Irish origin as did his name. He was much shorter than George, but his broad shoulders and extraordinary length of arm amply atoned for any deficiency in the matter of inches.
Terence was a bushman to his finger-tips, and once had been heir to a fine estate, but on the death of his father, two years before the opening of this story, he had been left penniless. Mrs. Moore had died when her boy was but an infant, and so it happened that the lad lost parent, money and home at one stroke, for the creditors seized his father's station, along with everything upon it which could be turned into cash.
Young Moore, then only eighteen, had not money enough to take up land and develop a new station, and though his dear friends, the Haughtons, would have helped him to any extent, he was too proud to become dependent, even upon them. So he started driving fat cattle from one part of the country to another, an occupation at once profitable and healthy. In the intervals of work he stayed in Sydney with his mother's sister; and thus securing the companionship of George Haughton, proceeded to make the latter still more discontented with his lot, by pouring into his ear all the moving incidents by flood and field which fall to the share of the gentleman-drover.
To this sympathetic friend did George now confide the tale of the crisis of his long dispute with his father, to which Terence, anxious to secure a congenial companion during his long rides through the bush, replied by an earnest appeal to George to throw in his lot with his own.
As a matter of fact, there had been a terrible scene at 'Sobraon.' For two years Colonel Haughton had fumed and fretted at his son's evident disinclination to follow the path marked out for him, and to-day a climax had been reached. The colonel, enraged at George's invincible opposition, had lost command of himself and struck his son; and the way in which it all came about was this:
After the famous battle of Sobraon, in which he was severely wounded, Colonel Haughton had retired from the army and bought a beautiful property on the wooded heights of one of the tiny bays which break the noble outline of Sydney Harbour. Here he had settled with his wife and his son, George, then a burly little fellow of three, whose obvious destiny was the army, in which his father had served with such distinction. But after the lad's tenth birthday the colonel's views underwent a change, and it was decided to send the youngster into the bush, so that he might grow familiar with station life, and in due course become capable of managing the fine run which his father intended to purchase for him.
This was much more to George's taste than school, and six months with his father's old friend, Major Moore, went far towards making a thorough little bushman of him. Terence and he were already chums, and the constant association which continued during their youth cemented a friendship which endured throughout their lives.
The colonel's 'system,' thus inaugurated, was further developed by a visit to New Zealand, where George's uncle, Captain Haughton, R.N., retired, had settled some years before. Thereafter Colonel Haughton divided each successive year into four parts, every three months of study alternating with a like period in the bush, either with Major Moore in New South Wales, or with Captain Haughton in New Zealand, as the turn of each came round.