‘My poor old mother’s very bad,’ said Jack, looking rueful, ‘and I must be home to-night, some time or other; but I don’t think anything else would have kept me from going up with the master, to see him all right with this new station as he’s going to buy.’
‘Do you—live—at—Appin?’ said the stranger young man, taking about a minute for the enunciation of each word, and speaking in a drawling, though not nasal, monotone.
‘When I’m at home, which is about once in five years, I do,’ answered Jack. ‘You live on the Hawkesbury, and haven’t ever been far from the river, I’ll swear.’
‘So I do, at Rooty Hill Farm, Nepean Point,’ said the New Hollander with a smile, which broke first upon the edge of the round plump face and gradually spread over it like the eddy in a pond. ‘How—did—you—come—to—know?’
‘By the look,’ said Jack coolly; ‘they don’t grow such men anywhere else in the colony, except on the Hawkesbury flats. My name’s Jack Windsor. What’s yours, old nineteen stun?’
‘I ain’t nineteen stun, I’m only seventeen,’ said the youthful giant, whose voice, however, did by no means correspond with his stature, being mild and small of timbre. ‘My name’s Harry Homminey, and I’ll back our land to grow more corn to the acre, let alone pumpkins, than any farm this side of the Blue Mountains.’
‘Like enough,’ answered Jack indifferently. ‘Shouldn’t wonder if you took to pumpkins very kind when you was young. They’re great feeding stuff. But your Windsor and Richmond farms is only handfuls after all. How many acres have you got?’
‘A hundred and thirty-two,’ said the Netherlander, with just pride, ‘and never a tree or a stump on it.’
‘Well, what’s that?’ demanded the denizen of the waste. ‘Why, a child can take up three hundred and twenty acres in the bush anywhere. I wouldn’t be bothered with land unless I had a whole section to begin with.’
‘It’s a deal better than no land at all; and that’s about what you have, I expect,’ said the agriculturist, gradually coming to the opinion and belief that Mr. Windsor was disposed to disparage him and his fat acres before Carry Walton.