"Of course!" Mac added, as an afterthought. "It's not often they find a
pal in a woman"; and I add to-day that when they do, that woman is to be
envied her friends.
"Eyes front!" Mac shouted suddenly, and in a moment the homestead was in
sight, and the front gate forty-five miles behind us. "If ever you DO
reach the homestead alive," the Darwin ladies had said; and now they were
three hundred miles away from us to the north-west.
"Sam's spotted us!" Mac smiled as we skimmed on, and a slim little
Chinaman ran across between the buildings. "We'd better do the thing in
style," and whipping up the horses, he whirled them through the open
slip-rails, past the stockyards, away across the grassy homestead
enclosure, and pulled up with a rattle of hoofs and wheels at the head of
a little avenue of buildings.
The Dandy, fresh and spotless, appeared in a doorway; black boys sprang
up like a crop of mushrooms and took charge of the buck-board; Dan
rattled in with the pack-teams, and horses were jangling hobbles and
rattling harness all about us, as I found myself standing in the shadow
of a queer, unfinished building, with the Maluka and Mac surrounded by a
mob of leaping, bounding dogs, flourishing, as best they could, another
"Welcome home!"
"Well?" Mac asked, beating off dogs at every turn. "Is it a House or a
Hut?"
"A Betwixt and Between," we decided; and then the Dandy was presented,
And the steady grey eyes apparently finding "something decent" in the
missus, with a welcoming smile and ready tact he said: "I'm sure we're
all real glad to see you." Just the tiniest emphasis on the word "you";
but that, and the quick, bright look that accompanied the emphasis, told,
as nothing else could, that it was "that other woman" that had not been
wanted. Unconventional, of course; but when a welcome is conventional
out-bush, it is unworthy of the name of welcome.
The Maluka, knew this well, but before he could speak, Mac had seized a
little half-grown dog - the most persistent of all the leaping dogs - by
her tightly curled-up tail, and, setting her down at my feet, said: "And
this is Tiddle'ums," adding, with another flourishing bow, "A present
from a Brither Scot," while Tiddle'ums in no way resented the dignity.
Having a tail that curled tightly over her back like a cup handle, she
expected to be lifted up by it.
Then one after the other Mac presented the station dogs: Quart-Pot,
Drover, Tuppence, Misery, Buller, and a dozen others; and as I bowed
gravely to each in turn Dan chuckled in appreciation:
