earthly possessions strapped before him.  Bravely the horse stepped out for its week’s journey, and bravely its rider sat, leaving me and the shadeless, wooden sun-baked house on the side of the hill, with the regretlessness of teens—­especially masculine teens.  I watched him depart until the clacking of his horse’s hoofs grew faint on the stony hillside and his form disappeared amid the she-oak scrub which crowned the ridge to the westward.  He was gone.  Such is life.  I sat down and buried my face in my apron, too miserable even for tears.  Here was another article I ill could spare wrenched from my poorly and sparsely furnished existence.

True, our intercourse had not always been carpeted with rose-leaves.  His pitiless scorn of my want of size and beauty had often given me a sleepless night; but I felt no bitterness against him for this, but merely cursed the Potter who had fashioned the clay that was thus described.

On the other hand, he was the only one who had ever stood up and said a word of extenuation for me in the teeth of a family squall.  Father did not count; my mother thought me bad from end to end; Gertie, in addition to the gifts of beauty and lovableness, possessed that of holding with the hare and running with the hound; but Horace once had put in a word for me that I would never forget.  I missed his presence in the house, his pounding of the old piano with four dumb notes in the middle, as he bawled thereto rollicking sea and comic songs; I missed his energetic dissertations on spurs, whips, and blood-horses, and his spirited rendering of snatches of Paterson and Gordon, as he came in and out, banging doors and gates, teasing the cats and dogs and tormenting the children.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The 3rd of December 1898

It was a very hot day.  So extreme was the heat that to save the lives of some young swallows my father had to put wet bags over the iron roof above their nest.  A galvanized-iron awning connected our kitchen and house:  in this some swallows had built, placing their nest so near the iron that the young ones were baking with the heat until rescued by the wet bagging.  I had a heavy day’s work before me, and, from my exertions of the day before, was tired at the beginning.  Bush-fires had been raging in the vicinity during the week, and yesterday had come so close that I had been called out to carry buckets of water all the afternoon in the blazing sun.  The fire had been allayed, after making a gap in one of our boundary fences.  Father and the boys had been forced to leave the harvesting of the miserable pinched wheat while they went to mend it, as the small allowance of grass the drought gave us was precious, and had to be carefully preserved from neighbours’ stock.

I had baked and cooked, scrubbed floors and whitewashed hearths, scoured tinware and cutlery, cleaned windows, swept yards, and discharged numerous miscellaneous jobs, and half-past two in the afternoon found me very dirty and very tired, and with very much more yet to do.