We Of The Never-Never By Jeanie
We Of The Never-Never By Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn - Page 16 of 162 - First - Home

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Like All Bushmen, He Could Be Delicately Reticent When Conferring A Favour; But A Forgotten Razor-Strop Betrayed Him Later On.

In the meantime we discovered the remainder of the Settlement from the Cottage verandahs, spying out the Police Station

As it lurked in ambush just round the first bend in a winding bush track - apparently keeping one eye on the "Pub"; and then we caught a gleam of white roofs away beyond further bends in the track, where the Overland Telegraph "Department" stood on a little rise, aloof from the "Pub" and the Police, shut away from the world, yet attending to its affairs, and, incidentally, to those of the bush-folk: a tiny Settlement, with a tiny permanent population of four men and two women - women who found their own homes all-sufficient, and rarely left them, although the men-folk were here, there, and everywhere.

All around and within the Settlement was bush: and beyond the bush, stretching away and away on every side of it, those hundreds of thousands of square miles that constitute the Never-Never - miles sending out and absorbing again from day to day the floating population of the Katherine.

Before supper the Telegraph Department and the Police Station called on the Cottage to present compliments. Then the Wag came with his welcome. "Didn't expect you to-day," he drawled, with unmistakable double meaning in his drawl. "You're come sooner than we expected. Must have had luck with the rivers "; and Mac became enthusiastic. "Luck!" he cried. "Luck! She's got the luck of the Auld Yin himself - skinned through everything by the skin of our teeth. No one else'll get through those rivers under a week." And they didn't.

Remembering the telegrams, the Wag shot a swift quizzing glance at him; but it took more than a glance to disconcert Mac once his mind was made up, and he met it unmoved, and entered into a vivid description of the "passage of the Fergusson," which filled in our time until supper.

After supper the Cottage returned the calls, and then, rain coming down in torrents, the Telegraph, the Police, the Cottage and the "Pub" retired to rest, wondering what the morrow would bring forth.

The morrow brought forth more rain, and the certainty that, as the river was still rising, the swim would be beyond the horses for several days yet; and because of this uncertainty, the Katherine bestirred itself to honour its tethered guests.

The Telegraph and the Police Station issued invitations for dinner, and the "Pub" that had already issued a hint that "the boys could refrain from knocking down cheques as long as a woman was staying in the place" now issued an edict limiting the number of daily drinks per man.

The invitations were accepted with pleasure, and the edict was attended to with a murmur of approval in which, however, there was one dissenting voice: a little bearded bushman "thought the Katherine was overdoing it a bit," and suggested as an amendment that "drunks could make themselves scarce when she's about." But Mine Host easily silenced him by offering to "see what the missus thought about it."

Then for a day the Katherine "took its bearings," and keen, scrutinising glances summed up the Unknown Woman, looking her through and through until she was no longer an Unknown Woman, while the Maluka looked on interested.

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