epared for him.

A tall gaunt man on a little horse. He was clean-shaven, except for
a frill beard round under his chin, and his long wavy, dark hair
was turning grey; a square, strong-faced man, and reminded me of one
full-faced portrait of Gladstone more than any other face I had seen.
He had large reddish-brown eyes, deep set under heavy eyebrows, and with
something of the blackfellow in them--the sort of eyes that will peer
at something on the horizon that no one else can see. He had a way of
talking to the horizon, too--more than to his companion; and he had a
deep vertical wrinkle in his forehead that no smile could lessen.

I got down and got out my pipe, and we sat on a log and yarned awhile on
bush subjects; and then, after a pause, he shifted uneasily, it seemed
to me, and asked rather abruptly, and in an altered tone, if I was
married. A queer question to ask a traveller; more especially in my
case, as I was little more than a boy then.

He talked on again of old things and places where we had both been, and
asked after men he knew, or had known--drovers and others--and whether
they were living yet. Most of his inquiries went back before my time;
but some of the drovers, one or two overlanders with whom he had been
mates in his time, had grown old into mine, and I knew them. I notice
now, though I didn't then--and if I had it would not have seemed
strange from a bush point of view--that he didn't ask for news, nor seem
interested in it.

Then after another uneasy pause, during which he scratched crosses in
the dust with a stick, he asked me, in the same queer tone and without
looking at me or looking up, if I happened to know anything about
doctoring--if I'd ever studied it.

I asked him if anyone was sick at his place. He hesitated, and said
"No." Then I wanted to know why he had asked me that question, and
he was so long about answering that I began to think he was hard of
hearing, when, at last, he muttered something about my face reminding
him of a young fellow he knew of who'd gone to Sydney to "study for a
doctor". That might have been, and looked natural enough; but why didn't
he ask me straight out if I was the chap he "knowed of"? Travellers do
not like beating about the bush in conversation.

He sat in silence for a good while, with his arms folded, and looking
absently away over the dead level of the great scrubs that spread
from the foot of the ridge we were on to where a blue peak or two of