on a lot of sheets of old stained and faded newspapers.
He looked at it in a puzzled way, knitting his forehead, then took it
up absently and folded it. I saw then that it was a riding skirt and
jacket. He bundled them into the newspapers and took them into the
bedroom.

"The wife was going on a visit down the creek this afternoon," he said
rapidly and without looking at me, but stooping as if to have another
look through the door at those distant peaks. "I suppose she got tired
o' waitin', and went and took the daughter with her. But, never mind,
the grub is ready." There was a camp-oven with a leg of mutton and
potatoes sizzling in it on the hearth, and billies hanging over the
fire. I noticed the billies had been scraped, and the lids polished.

There seemed to be something queer about the whole business, but then he
and his wife might have had a "breeze" during the morning. I thought
so during the meal, when the subject of women came up, and he said one
never knew how to take a woman, etc.; but there was nothing in what he
said that need necessarily have referred to his wife or to any woman in
particular. For the rest he talked of old bush things, droving, digging,
and old bushranging--but never about live things and living men, unless
any of the old mates he talked about happened to be alive by accident.
He was very restless in the house, and never took his hat off.

There was a dress and a woman's old hat hanging on the wall near the
door, but they looked as if they might have been hanging there for a
lifetime. There seemed something queer about the whole place--something
wanting; but then all out-of-the-way bush homes are haunted by that
something wanting, or, more likely, by the spirits of the things that
should have been there, but never had been.

As I rode down the track to the road I looked back and saw old Howlett
hard at work in a hole round a big stump with his long-handled shovel.

I'd noticed that he moved and walked with a slight list to port, and put
his hand once or twice to the small of his back, and I set it down to
lumbago, or something of that sort.

Up in the Never Never I heard from a drover who had known Howlett that
his wife had died in the first year, and so this mysterious woman, if
she was his wife, was, of course, his second wife. The drover seemed
surprised and rather amused at the thought of old Howlett going in for
matrimony again.

. . . . .

I rode back that way