"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.
