"I promised to look in some time or other. Good evening, Mrs. Gregory; you have late visitors to-night."
The company found seats in the mean room, which was hard taxed to serve everybody. There was no change in the place since Power had gone away. On the rough table stood the wash basin. The shelf at the back held the crockery. The boxes stood on end for seats. The wire strainer and the potato digger lay in the corner. Power took all in as he filled his pipe again.
"I reckon you make the old place lively dropping in like this," Mrs. Gregory began, looking from one to the other, and leering at Gregory when the time came. "Dad was saying you had been a long while away, and must be hitched up on the road."
"Things went like wedding bells," said Power. "We put in a couple of days at Morning Springs. That kept us."
"A bit of a spree?" questioned Gregory.
"We are respectable men on Kaloona."
Mick O'Neill had sat down, pushing his spurred feet in front of him across the room. He had brought a new shirt on his back and had dressed his legs in clean trousers, belted with a bright knotted handkerchief. A hat with a gay dent in the crown had fallen upon the table. He had arrived pleased in advance with what might befall, a laugh prisoned in his mouth, a merry word harnessed to his tongue. He sat there, a man forgetting the past where the present was kind; a good fellow who must quicken the heart of any man or woman. Maybe so thought Power, who lost little of what went round.
"Things aren't much changed here, are they, Mr. Power?" said Gregory in a minute or two. "A man don't feel much like putting a house ship-shape at night after a day's shovelling. That show has got me beat. Gone down into rock now."
"It's time I kept my promise of a hand," said Mick. "I reckoned for you to be half way under the river."
"No buyers since we were away?" Power asked.