“So’m I.”  Bunty finished up everything on his plate in choking haste and stood up.  “And that horrid coffee’s running into my boots.”

So just as the sun began to smile and chase away the sky’s heavy tears, they all went to bed again to make up for the broken night, and it was:  six o’clock and tea-time before any of them opened their eyes again.

CHAPTER XVI Yarrahappini

Yarrahappini in the sunshine, the kind of sunshine that pushes the thermometer’s silver thread up to 100 deg.!

Right away in the distance on three sides was a blue hill line and blue soft trees.

And up near the house the trees were green and beautiful, and the flowers a blaze of colour.

But all the stretching plain between was brown Brown burnt grass with occasional patches of dull green, criss-crossed here and there with fences; that ran up the little hills that in places broke the plain’s straight line, and disappeared in the dips where rank grass and bracken flourished.  The head station consisted of quite a little community of cottages on the top of a hill.  Years ago, when Esther was no bigger than her own little General, there had been only a rough, red weather-board place on the hill-top, and a bark but or two for outhouses.

And Mr. Hassal had been in the saddle from morning to night, and worked harder than any two of his own stockmen, and Mrs. Hassal had laid aside her girlish accomplishments, her fancy work, her guitar, her water-colours, and had scrubbed and cooked and washed as many a settler’s wife has done before, until the anxiously watched wool market had brought them better days.

Then a big stone cottage reared itself slowly right in front of the little old place with its bottle-bordered garden plot, where nothing more aristocratic than pig’s face and scarlet geranium had ever grown.  A beautiful cottage it was, with its plenitude of lofty rooms, its many windows, and its deep veranda.  The little home was kitchen and bedrooms for the two women servants now, and was joined to the big place by a covered way.

A hundred yards away there was a two-roomed cottage that was occupied by the son of an English baronet, who, for the consideration of seventy pounds a year and rations kept the Yarrahappini business books and gave out the stores.

Farther still, two bark humpies stood, back to back.  Tettawonga, a bent old black fellow, lived in one, and did little else than smoke and give his opinion on the weather every morning.

Twenty years ago he had helped to make a steady foundation for the red cottage that had arrived ready built on a bullock-dray.

Fifteen years ago he had killed with his tomahawk one of two bushrangers who were trying to pick up Yarrahappini in the absence of his master, and he had carried little trembling Mrs. Hassal and tiny Esther to place of safety, and gone back and dealt the other one a blow on the head that stunned him till assistance came.