.
There's nothing and nobody that can get over me unless I like. I can be
as steady as a rock. My chum sees the paper this morning, and says he to
me: 'Go on, Harry: loving parent. That's five quid sure.' So we scraped
all our pockets for the fare. Devil of a lark!"

"You have a hard heart, I am afraid," she sighed.

"What for? For running away? Why! he wanted to make a lawyer's clerk of
me--just to please himself. Master in his own house; and my poor mother
egged him on--for my good, I suppose. Well, then--so long; and I went.
No, I tell you: the day I cleared out, I was all black and blue from his
great fondness for me. Ah! he was always a bit of a character. Look at
that shovel now. Off his chump? Not much. That's just exactly like my
dad. He wants me here just to have somebody to order about. However,
we two were hard up; and what's five quid to him--once in sixteen hard
years?"

"Oh, but I am sorry for you. Did you never want to come back home?"

"Be a lawyer's clerk and rot here--in some such place as this?" he cried
in contempt. "What! if the old man set me up in a home to-day, I would
kick it down about my ears--or else die there before the third day was
out."

"And where else is it that you hope to die?"

"In the bush somewhere; in the sea; on a blamed mountain-top for choice.
At home? Yes! the world's my home; but I expect I'll die in a hospital
some day. What of that? Any place is good enough, as long as I've lived;
and I've been everything you can think of almost but a tailor or a
soldier. I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared sheep; and humped my
swag; and harpooned a whale. I've rigged ships, and prospected for gold,
and skinned dead bullocks,--and turned my back on more money than the
old man would have scraped in his whole life. Ha, ha!"

He overwhelmed her. She pulled herself together and managed to utter,
"Time to rest now."

He straightened himself up, away from the wall, and in a severe voice
said, "Time to go."

But he did not move. He leaned back again, and hummed thoughtfully a bar
or two of an outlandish tune.

She felt as if she were about to cry. "That's another of your cruel
songs," she said.

"Learned it in Mexico--in Sonora." He talked easily. "It is the song of
the Gambucinos. You don't know? The song of restless men. Nothing could
hold them in one place--not even a woman. You used to meet one of them
now and again, in the old days, on the edge of the gold country, away
no