"Here y'are, Jack. Pay me some other time."
"Thanks, Harry!" grunted Old Jack, as he twisted for his pocket.
It was a cold night, the hint of a possible shanty thawed the
traveller a bit, and he relaxed with a couple of grunts about the,
weather and the road, which were received in a brotherly spirit.
Harry's horses stopped of their own accord in front of the house, an
old bark-and-slab whitewashed humpy of the early settlers' farmhouse
type, with a plank door in the middle, one bleary-lighted window on
one side, and one forbiddingly blind one, as if death were there, on
the other. It might have been. The door opened, letting out a flood
of lamp-light and firelight which blindly showed the sides of the
coach and the near pole horse and threw the coach lamps and the rest
into the outer darkness of the opposing bush.
"Is that you, Harry?" called a voice and tone like Mrs Warren's of
the Profession.
"It's me."
A stoutly aggressive woman appeared. She was rather florid, and
looked, moved and spoke as if she had been something in the city in
other years, and had been dumped down in the bush to make money in
mysterious ways; had married, mated--or got herself to be supposed to
be married--for convenience, and continued to make money by mysterious
means. Anyway, she was "Mother Mac" to the bush, but, in the bank
in the "town," and in the stores where she dealt, she was _Mrs_
Mac, and there was always a promptly propped chair for her.
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