He gazed at the old slab hut, the first real expensive regular station-building which the property had boasted. How proud he had been of it too! Slabs averaging over a foot wide! Upper and lower wall-plates all complete. Loop holes, necessities of the period, on either side of the chimney. Never was there such a hut. It was the first one he had helped to build, and it was shrined as a palace in his imagination for years after.
And now that the rude old days were gone, and the pretty cottage stood, amid the fruitful orchard and trim flower-beds, that the brown face of Harry the groom appears, from a well-ordered stable, with half-a-dozen colts and hacks duly done by at rack and manger, that the stackyard showed imposingly with its trimly-thatched ricks, and that the table was already laid by Mrs. Stirling, the housekeeper, in the cool dining-room, and “decored with napery” very creditable to a bachelor establishment;—was he to leave all this realized order, this capitalized comfort, and go forth into the arid wilderness of the interior, suffering the passed-away privations of the “bark hut and tin pot era”—all for the sake of—what? Making more money! He felt ashamed of himself, as Geordie came forward with a smile of welcome upon his rugged face, and said—
“Well, master, I was afraid you was never coming back. Here’s that fellow Fakewell been and mustered on the sly again, and it’s the greatest mercy as I heard only the day before.”
“You were there, I’ll be bound, Geordie.”
“Ye’ll ken that, sir, though I had to ride half the night. It was well worth a ride, though. I got ten good calves and a gra-and two-year-old, unbranded heifer, old Poll’s, you’ll mind her, that got away at weaning.”
“I don’t remember—but how did you persuade Fakewell to take your word? I should have thought he’d have forged half-a-dozen mothers for a beast of that age.”
“Well, we had a sair barney, well nigh a fight, you might be sure. At last I said, ‘I’ll leave it to the black boy to say whose calf she is, and if he says the wrong cow you shall have her.’
“‘But how am I to know,’ says he, ‘that you haven’t told him what to say?’
“‘You saw him come up. Hoo could I know she was here?’
“‘Well, that’s true,’ says he. ‘Well, now you tell me the old cow’s name as you say she belongs to, so as he can’t hear, and then I’ll ask him the question.’