Mr. Levison again regarded Ernest fixedly. His calm features, across whose lineaments the ripple of a positive opinion or sentiment rarely broke, might have been taken to denote the benevolent toleration of one who hears a spoiled child insist upon being presented with a portion of the moon, or propose, with saline agency, the capture of an uncaged bird.
‘Population—what’s the good of population on a cattle station?’ he said, with his usual slow, unpunctuated direction of speech. ‘All the crop they’ll ever get out of that land you may put in your coat pocket. In a dry season it’s as much as the salt-bush will grow, let alone grass or crops. In a wet one, all this country’s like a garden, from the Paroo to the Macquarie. Your horses don’t want corn then, or hay—wouldn’t eat it if they were paid for it. What are farmers to grow here that would pay for carriage to the coast? Wheat they can’t think of in a hot place like this. Rice and such things they might have a try at, if they were Chinamen. But I can tell you what they will do.’
‘What is that?’ inquired Ernest, reassured.
‘Why, you’ll find that their cattle will go on increasing pretty fast; and what with grass rights and taking their blocks a little way off each other, they’ll have nigh as much of Rainbar as you will in three or four years. I suppose that isn’t what you fetched ’em up for?’
‘I do not grudge them a fair share of the Crown land,’ said Ernest. ‘The land was made for all of us. But I certainly did not anticipate their requiring more than a limited area at any time.’
‘Well, it will be unlimited if you don’t manage to hem ’em in somehow. They’ll give you your work to do, take my word for it, some of these fine days. My nags are a little fresher, and I am obliged to you for as good a mount as ever I crossed.’
‘I am very happy to have been able to do you so small a service; and as for your advice, which you have been friend enough to favour me with,’ said Ernest, feeling depressed and much lowered in spirit by his guest’s extremely ‘faithful’ criticism, ‘I can assure you that it has sunk deeply into my mind.’
‘I’m glad of that,’ said Mr. Levison gravely. ‘There’s very few men worth bothering with in the way of advice, and fewer still that aren’t too great fools to take it when it’s put before ’em. But I took a fancy to you, somehow, from the first time we met, when you had the thick boots and the swag. I thought that it showed pluck in you; and, from what I see here, you’re one of those that goes in for helping other people along the road of life. And a thundering soft thing it is, in a general way, I tell you. Why, you’ve been teaching that native chap to read, so he says.’
‘I plead guilty to that,’ said Ernest, with a smile. ‘The fact is that Jack Windsor is such a smart fellow that is seems a pity he should be left helpless, as all ignorant men are. And there’s plenty of spare time in the bush.’
‘Is there?’ said Mr. Levison. ‘I never found it so. But that says nothing. I say it’s a manly thing to feel for your neighbour because maybe he hasn’t had a hundredth part of the chances you’ve had yourself. That’s being kind and true-hearted, and being a gentleman, as I understand it,’ concluded Mr. Levison, with rather unusual emphasis. ‘But that’s not what I want to say,’ pursued he, buckling up the girths of his second saddle, and arranging his pack with the most accurate balance possible. ‘It’s this: you want some more store cattle on Rainbar.’