m
him, a few days or a week of his society at home now and then--say once
in three months. But he couldn't spare her even that--his time was taken
up so much in fashionable London and Paris and other places. He would
give the world to be able to take his proud, soft old father's hand now
and look into his eyes as one man who understands another. He would be
glad and eager to give his mother twelve months out of the year if he
thought it would make her happier. It has been too late for more than
twenty years."

Old Danny called for Peter.

Mitchell jerked his head approvingly and gave a sound like a sigh and
chuckle conjoined, the one qualifying the other.

"I told you you'd get it, Joe," he said.

"I don't see how it hits me," said Joe.

"But it hit all the same, Joe."

"Well, I suppose it did," said Joe, after a short pause.

"He wouldn't have hit you so hard if you hadn't tried to parry,"
reflected Mitchell. "It's your turn now, Jack."

Jack Barnes said nothing.

"Now I know that Peter would do anything for a woman or child, or an
honest, straight, hard-up chap," said Mitchell, straightening out his
legs and folding his arms, "but I can't quite understand his being so
partial to drunken scamps and vagabonds, black sheep and never-do-wells.
He's got a tremendous sympathy for drunks. He'd do anything to help a
drunken man. Ain't it marvellous? It's my private opinion that Peter
must have been an awful boozer and scamp in his time."

The other two only thought. Mitchell was privileged. He was a young
man of freckled, sandy complexion, and quizzical grey eyes. "Sly Joker"
"could take a rise out of anyone on the quiet;" "You could never tell
when he was getting at you;" "Face of a born comedian," as bushmen said
of Mitchell. But he would probably have been a dead and dismal failure
on any other stage than that of wide Australia.

Peter came back and they sat and smoked, and maybe they reflected along
four very different back-tracks for a while.

The surveyor started to sing again:

I have heard the mavis singing
Her love-song to the morn.
I have seen the dew-drop clinging
To the rose just newly born.

They smoked and listened in silence all through to the end. It was very
still. The full moon was high. The long white slender branches of a
box-tree stirred gently overhead; the she-oaks in the creek sighed as
they are always sighing, and the southern peak seemed ever so far away.