s----and especially visitors when they
came--were mighty interested in Bogan; and I reckon we were rather proud
of having a blind wool-sorter. I reckon Bogan had thirty or forty pairs
of eyes watching out for him in case he'd run against something or fall.
It irritated him to be messed round too much--he said a baby would never
learn to walk if it was held all the time. He reckoned he'd learn more
in a year than a man who'd served a lifetime to blindness; but we didn't
let him wander much--for fear he'd fall into the big rocky waterhole
there, by accident.

"And after the shearing-season Bogan's wife turned up in Bourke----"

"Bogan's wife!" I exclaimed. "Why, I never knew Bogan was married."

"Neither did anyone else," said Mitchell. "But he was. Perhaps that was
what accounted for Bogan. Sometimes, in his sober moods, I used to have
an idea that there must have been something behind the Bogan to account
for him. Perhaps he got trapped--or got married and found out that he'd
made a mistake--which is about the worst thing a man can find out----"

"Except that his wife made the mistake, Mitchell," said Tom Hall.

"Or that both did," reflected Mitchell. "Ah, well!--never mind--Bogan
had been married two or three years. Maybe he got married when he was on
the spree--I knew that he used to send money to someone in Sydney and I
suppose it was her. Anyway, she turned up after he was blind. She was a
hard-looking woman--just the sort that might have kept a third-rate pub
or a sly-grog shop. But you can't judge between husband and wife, unless
you've lived in the same house with them--and under the same roofs with
their parents right back to Adam for that matter. Anyway, she stuck
to Bogan all right; she took a little two-roomed cottage and made
him comfortable--she's got a sewing-machine and a mangle and takes in
washing and sewing. She brought a carrotty-headed youngster with
her, and the first time I saw Bogan sitting on the veranda with that
youngster on his knee I thought it was a good thing that he was blind."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because the youngster isn't his," said Mitchell.

"How do you know that?"

"By the look of it--and by the look on her face, once, when she caught
me squinting from the kid's face to Bogan's."

"And whose was it?" I asked, without thinking.

"How am I to know?" said Mitchell. "It might be yours for all I
know--it's ugly enough, and you never had any taste in women. But you
mustn't speak