looked hard at him, and then cried roughly,

"Get out of this, or I'll lock you up."

Chook's mates helped him to his feet, and he staggered away like a
drunken man. Suddenly he became aware that someone was crying softly
near him, and, turning his head, found that it was Pinkey, who was
holding his arm and guiding his steps. He wrenched his arm free with
an oath, remembering that she was the cause of his fight and defeat.
"Wot the 'ell are yous doin' 'ere? Go an' tell yer bloke I nearly got
lumbered."

"I ain't got no bloke," sobbed Pinkey.

"Wotcher mean?" cried Chook.

"I don't run after people I don't want," said Pinkey, smiling through
her tears.

"Fair dinkum?" cried Chook.

Pinkey nodded her head, with its crown of hair that glittered like
bronze.

Chook stopped to think.

"I'm orl right," he said to Waxy and Joe; "I'll ketch up with yer in a
minit." They understood and walked on.

He stood and stared at Pinkey with a scowl that softened imperceptibly
into a smile, and then a passionate flame leapt into his eyes.

"Cum 'ere," he said; and Pinkey obeyed him like a child.

He looked at her with a gloating fondness in his eyes, and then caught
her in his arms and kissed her with his bleeding lips.

"Ugh, I'm all over blood!" cried the girl with a shuddering laugh, as
she wiped her lips with her handkerchief.

CHAPTER 10

JONAH DECLARES WAR

As it promised to be a slack week, Paasch had decided to dress the
window himself, as he felt that the goods were not displayed to their
proper advantage. This was a perquisite of Jonah's, for which he was
paid eighteenpence extra once a fortnight; but Jonah had deserted
him--a fact which he discovered by finding that Jonah's tools, his only
property, were missing.

So he had spent a busy morning in renovating his entire stock with
double coats of Peerless Gloss, the stock that the whole neighbourhood
knew by sight--the watertight bluchers with soles an inch thick that a
woolwasher from Botany had ordered and left on his hands; the pair of
kangaroo tops that Pat Riley had ordered the week he was pinched for
manslaughter; the pair of flash kid lace-ups, high in the leg, that
Katey Brown had thrown at his head because they wouldn't meet round her
thick calves; and half a dozen pairs of misfits into which half the
neighbourhood had tried to coax their feet because they were dirt cheap.

But the pride of the collection was a monstrous abortion of