A belt of great trees made a shade at one side, and along the other was the barbed-wire fence that showed they had not got away from the Yarrahappini estate even yet:  higher up was the lonely bark hut of one of the stockmen.

They went up in a body to speak to him before he joined the bullock team, and to view his solitary dwelling.

Just a small room it was, with a wide fireplace and chimney, where hung a frying-pan, a billy, a cup, and a spoon.  There was a bunk in one corner, with a couple of blue blankets on it, a deal table and one chair in the middle of the room.  Over the fire-place hung a rough cupboard, made out of a soap-box, and used to hold rations.  From a nail in the low ceiling a mosquito-net bag was suspended, and the buzzing flies around proclaimed that it held meat.  The walls were papered with many a copy of “The Illustrated Sydney News”, and “The Town and Country Journal”; there was a month-old “Daily Telegraph” lying on the chair, where the owner had laid it down.

A study in brown the stockman was, brown, dull eyes; brown, dusty-looking hair; brown skin, sundried and shrivelled; brown, unkempt beard; brown trousers of corduroy, and brown coat.

His pipe was black, however—­a clay, that looked as if it had been smoked for twenty years.

“Wouldn’t you like to be nearer the homestead?” Meg asked.  “Isn’t it lonely?”

“Not ter mention,” the brown man said to his pipe or his beard.

“What do you do with yourself when you’re, not outside?” asked Pip.

“Smoke,” said the man.

“But on Sundays, and all through the evenings?”

“Smoke,” he said.

“On Cwismas day,” Baby said, pressing to see this strange man; “zen what does you do?”

“Smoke” he said.

Judy wanted to know how long he’d lived in the little place, and everyone was stricken dumb to hear he had been there most of the time for seven years.

“Don’t you ever forget how to talk?” she said, in an awestruck voice.

But he answered laconically to his beard that there was the cat.

Baby had found it already under the kerosene tin that did duty for a bucket, and it had scratched her in three places:  brown, like its master, it was evil-eyed, fiercely whiskered, thin as a rail; still, there was the affection of years between the two.

Mr. Gillet told him of the squatter’s wish that he should go with the other men and help with the tree.  He pulled a brown hat over his brow and moved away towards the bullock-dray, which had crept up the winding road by now, to the hill-top.

“Water in tub, nearer than creek,” he muttered to his pipe before he went, and they found his tub-tank and gladly filled the billy ready for lunch.

Mrs. Hassal’s roast fowls and duck tasted well; even though they frizzled on the plates as if the sun were trying to finish their cooking.  And the apple tarts and apricot turnovers vanished speedily; and of the fruit salad that came forth from two screw-top bottles, not a teaspoonful remained to tell a tale.