h as it was, had been with sheep in the, then, unsettled
north. Joan was herself a girl in short frocks, three or four years
younger than Colin McKeith, and with no apparent prospect of ever
crossing the 'big fella Water,' as the Ubi Blacks called it, or of
joining the band of Bohemian scribblers in London.

She remembered how quickly Colin had learned his work--remembered how
the shy self-contained lad, with always that grim memory of his boyhood
shaping a vengeful purpose in his mind and making him old for his
years, had developed the flair of the Bush in his hardy Scotch
constitution. She was compelled to own that he had developed, too, some
of the worst as well as the best of those Scotch qualities inherited
from his parents, expatriated though they had been, and from the
staunch clansmen behind them. He had the Scotch loyalty; likewise, the
Scotch tenacity of character which never forgot and very seldom
forgave; the Scotch obstinacy of purpose and opinion; the Scotch
acquisitiveness; a tendency too to 'nearness' in matters of small
expenditure which combined oddly with a generosity amounting almost to
recklessness in large enterprise. It was on the whole not a bad outfit
for a pioneer who meant to get on in his world.

The beginnings were small, but indicative of the trend of his career.
He contrived, even when he was earning no salary but working only for
his 'tucker,' to get together a horse or two, a cow or two, a specially
good cattle-dog or two, which last he made the nucleus of a profitable
breed. The cows and bullocks he left at Bungroopim when the time came
for him to push out, reclaiming them after they had increased and
multiplied in those pleasant pastures like Jacob's herds in the fields
of Laban.

Not that there was any seven years matrimonial question. There had been
no Leah. Or if Joan Gildea had ever played the part of Rachel in Colin
McKeith's sentimental dreams, those boyish dreams had left no serious
mark upon him. He had gone north to a newly-formed station and had
there out-bushed the bushman in his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of
cattle and sheep and his amazing faculty for spotting country suitable
for either. Here no doubt his descent from generations of herdsmen had
stood him in good stead.

He sold his knowledge to rich squatters in the settled districts who
employed him to take up new country for them and to manage the hundreds
of square miles and the thousands of stock from which