On Windee there was plenty but no waste. On most stations and farms the waste and neglect are scandalous. In consequence profits are small and wages are kept down to the minimum demanded by law. Jeffrey Stanton raged and blasphemed if he saw a shovel lying unused in the sun, but he paid his men fifty per cent higher wages than those given by the great mass of station-owners and laid down by law as the minimum. For this he was unpopular in his own class—but he was a millionaire. He expected good service for his high wages, and saw that he got it.
The inspecting party eventually arrived at the blacksmith’s shop. Here the blacksmith and two off-siders were welding and fitting dray tyres. It was work that could not be interrupted, and, after nodding to the smith, Stanton looked casually about and was on the point of leaving, when he saw in a corner a heavy cast-iron object that in shape and size was very similar to the case holding a four-point-nine howitzer shell.
It was, he knew, a dolly-pot used by gold miners to pound up samples of ore to dust, then to flood the dust with water and roughly ascertain the gold content.
“Where does that come from, Bates?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Left here for the time by Dot and Dash,” was Bates’s reply. “They brought it in from Range Hut a month or so back.”
A six-nick iron tyre was on the anvil, held by the two off-siders. The part resting on the anvil was white-hot, and the smith’s hammer clanged and clanged on it, shooting out white-hot sparks and flakes. Stanton watched for a few seconds, wondering who was the first man to discover that iron would run, and how.
He was reminded of another matter.
“By the way, Bates, we ordered a further supply of nitric acid for that job. It should reach us next week.”
“Good!” said Bates. “It’s dooced funny where that bottle of acid went to.”
“Yes,” agreed Stanton; “damned funny! Better lock up the next lot.” Out again in the strong sunshine, where the wind rustled through the leaves of the pepper-tree shading the shop, the clanging of iron on iron behind him, and the screeches of the grey-backed galahs over in the creek trees, Stanton nodded to Bates and walked to the house. The inspection was over.
He paused at the wicket-gate and looked back at the familiar scene. He was facing then to the north, and could see how his home lay on the edge of a great plain. To the east the sand country, whereon grew the pines and mulga, a wide belt of them lying between him and Mount Lion, dark against the brazen sky. To the west all was light—quivering, dancing light. The mirage lay deep over the great plain of salt-bush and spear grass, magically transforming the scattered clumps of trees into towering umbrella-topped masts, and causing the summits of the hills forty miles westward to appear as islands floating on a cadmium sea.
The stern weather-beaten face of Jeffrey Stanton softened. In his heart he felt a great peace. The strife and struggles of youth were over. His boy and his girl were safe from want and neither would ever know the hardships he and the woman who lay in the cemetery close by had known. Not that he allowed them to lead soft lives.
“Why, Dad, you are in a brown study!” exclaimed a voice behind him. “Come along! The morning tea is waiting.”
And, turning, Jeffrey Stanton met the eyes of Marion, his daughter, and smiled.
Chapter Six
Bony Educates a Horse
Marion Stanton was dark of hair, with a creamy complexion. The contrast was the most striking thing about her, noticeable long before the features were examined. Then it was that the observer wondered at the wide level forehead, so indicative of calm reason when allied to the beautifully curved chin, tempered by the soft, dainty mouth that made a man think of all that is delightful in womanhood.
In repose her face was not beautiful, but when it was lit by the light of personality shining from her grey eyes it was to glimpse something of wonder and attraction, a richly lovely woman.
She and Stanton sat on the wide fly-netted south veranda with a small tea laden table between them, father and daughter in appearance as opposite as the poles. The man over sixty, the girl not yet twenty-five; the father slight and lithe, the daughter big-boned and active; the one at sixty showing the effects of a hard, tough life spent mostly on a horse, the other at twenty-five revealing womanly gentleness and grace. Yet to observe them together was to know that one begat the other, for when they smiled it was very often with their eyes alone.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten that we are to tin-kettle the Fosters to-morrow night,” Marion observed, pouring her father his second cup.
“I had forgotten, but I am not going,” Stanton said a little grimly. “If you think that I, at my age, intend to travel eighty miles to play the fool round my overseer’s house, then you want to think something else.”
“That is just what I am doing, Dad.”
“Good!”
Stanton drank his tea in silence. His daughter’s expression had subtly changed, and he knew that he was in for a battle he would probably lose, because he had lost every battle but one fought between them since the day his daughter was born. He awaited stoically her next broadside.
“Harry Foster has worked for you since he left school in—let me think—yes, in nineteen-seven,” she said. “Without counting the years he was away fighting the Germans so that you could make more money, he has been working for you for thirteen years. You have never had one single uneasy thought that he wasn’t doing his job with all his heart.”
“I’ve paid him well. I’ve——”
“He has worked hard for you, not so much because of the money, but because you gave him his chance,” went on the inexorable voice. “You gave him his chance because you liked him, far more than because he knew his job. Ethel and he have gone to a lot of trouble for tomorrow night, and if the Big Boss is not there I know they will be ever so disappointed.”
Jeffrey Stanton abstracted from his pocket a tin of tobacco, a packet of cigarette papers and a box of matches. From those articles, which he set on the table before him, he looked at his daughter, and said in the voice of a martyr: “May I smoke?”
“Father, you are going?”
“No!”—emphatically.
“Ethel is my best friend, and you will go just to please me, won’t you?” Her eyes were twin stars. The appeal in them was a vision of beauty. No living man could have won so unequal a battle. Stanton said:
“Damnation!”
“Dear old Dad!” cried she. “I knew you would say yes. For going I’ll make your cigarette for you. I can make them so much better than you can. You always make them with a camel’s hump in the middle.”
Without speaking, he gave her the materials, and, whilst watching her supple fingers, he thought of his wife and the expression he had seen in her eyes the second before she gave him her first kiss.
“If we leave at half-past seven, we shall get there at ten o’clock,” he heard her say when he accepted the cigarette she had made and lit for him. “Mrs Poulton can come with us. You’ll let as many of the men go as want to, won’t you?”
“Decidedly,” Stanton agreed, accepting defeat with quite a good grace. “I’ll push ’em off on the trucks before seven, so that we’ll all get there together. They’ll be fit for nothing on Monday, but what matters work when my lady’s