“And these pickers of yours, how long have they been with you?”
The lines in the farmer’s face rearranged themselves abruptly.
“Poor devils, they look on this as a sort of yearly picnic, doctor. There are about fifty of them, and they’ve been at Goldspur about ten days.”
“Many children?”
“Children? Plenty. If they were Irish, they’d bring the family pig out, doctor, just to give him some new sort of dirt to wallow in. But then, what can you expect—what can you expect?”
They had left the park by the western lodge, and came out upon a stretch of undulating fields closed in the near distance by woods of oak and beech. A tall, gabled farm-house of red brick rose outlined against the sky with a great fir topping its chimney-stacks like the flat cloud seen above a volcano in full eruption. Near it, fronting the road, were a few nondescript cottages; farther still a jumble of barns, outhouses, and stables. In the middle of a fourteen-acre field Murchison could see two zinc-roofed sheds and a couple of old military tents standing isolated in a waste of sodden, dreary soil.
Mr. Carrington pointed to them with his whip.
“There’s the colony. Will you come in first, doctor, and have—” he reconsidered the words and cleared his throat—“and have—a cup of tea?”
Murchison had noticed the break in the invitation, and had reddened.
“No, thanks. We had better walk, I suppose?”