“A good hatching?” he asked, with raised brows.
“Yes. Ninety-one out of the hundred.”
“How do they weigh up, Ted?” interrupted Nettlefold, his thoughts running on more important things than chickens.
“Fair. Ought to average eight hundred pounds dressed. There’s eight hundred and nineteen in the muster. Will you look ’em over?”
“May as well, now that you’ve brought the spare hack. Who have you got with you beside Ned Hamlin and Shuteye?”
“Bill Sikes and Fred the Dogger.”
Nettlefold nodded and then, telling Elizabeth he would not be long, he swung into the saddle of the spare hack and rode away stiffly towards the milling cattle. Ted Sharp waved his hat to the girl. Elizabeth smiled and waved back. He was the most cheerful, life-loving man she had ever known.
With the smile still playing about her lips she watched them ride towards the cattle: her father stiffly, his head stockman with the swinging grace of one who spends the daylight hours on the back of a horse. Sharp pointed out something relative to the cattle, and the horses began to canter in a wide arc.
Ted Sharp had arrived from nowhere in particular eleven years before, and even now he was not much more than thirty. When he came to Coolibah Elizabeth had been a tomboy of fourteen, and her mother had been dead four years. From early childhood she could ride, but with the coming of Ted Sharp her horses and her riding improved beyond measure. He was a born horse-breaker, beside being a first-rate cattleman, and it was not long before he was promoted boss stockman. He appeared to be a born boss stockman, too, for he never had the slightest trouble with the men.
Presently her father and he came riding slowly back to the car. They were in earnest conversation, and she guessed without hesitation the subject of discussion. She could not possibly be wrong, because when two men meet anywhere in cattle country they talk cattle.
“We’re all going to Golden Dawn to-morrow, Miss Eliz’beth,” the boss stockman called out while distance still separated them. “Mr Nettlefold says we can go. Hope to see you there, too. You must command your father to take you.”
“I never command my father to do anything,” she corrected him, her serious expression belied by laughing eyes.
The big, bluff manager of Coolibah regarded her with obvious pride. Everything about her—the grey tailor-made costume, the modish hat which did not conceal the golden sheen of her hair—combined to place his daughter on an equal footing with the smartest city women.
“No, you never command, Elizabeth,” he said slowly. “But somehow I always obey.”
Giving Sharp the reins of the horse, he walked to the car and climbed in behind the wheel. There, having settled his big, strong body, he proceeded to cut chips from a large plug of black tobacco, the kind which has long gone out of fashion among bushmen.
“Tell Sanders that I have arranged credit for him at Quilpie, Cunnamulla and Bourke,” he directed. “Ask him to let me know by wire when he has trucked these beasts because there may be enough fats in Bottom Bend for him to lift in January to take to Cockburn for Adelaide. We’re due for a dry time after this run of good seasons, and I don’t want to be caught overstocked.”
“All right! There’ll be fats enough in Bottom Bend, I’ll bet.”
“There should be, provided we don’t get an overdose of windstorms to blow away all the feed. Well, we’ll get on. Want to get back home to-night. So long!”
“So long, Mr Nettlefold! Au revoir, Miss Eliz’beth.”
Having given the manager a quick salute, the boss stockman was less hasty with the daughter. She eyed him coolly, but her look only made his smile broaden. She laughed at him when the car began to move, and returned his salute with a white-gloved hand.
Twenty minutes later they were across the plain and among the stunted bloodwoods and the mulgas. Here in this imitation forest grew no ground feed of bush and grass, but it provided good top feed in dry times.
A few miles of scrub, and then their way lay across a wide area of broken sand country criss-crossed by water gutters that appeared to follow no uniform direction. It was barren save for far-spaced, thirst-tortured coolibah trees, and here and there patches of tussock-grass. An amazing place, this. It was the studio of the Wind King who had chiselled the sand hummocks into fantastic shapes, a veritable hell when the hot westerlies blew in November and March.
Sixty miles from home they boiled the billy for lunch, the car halted in the shadow cast blackly on the glaring ground by three healthy bloodwoods. The girl set up the low canvas table beside the running board. She busied herself with cut sandwiches and little cakes and crockery ware which her father never thought of bringing when he travelled by himself. Alone, his tucker box furnished with a tin pannikin and a butcher’s killing knife, bread and cold meat, tea and sugar, sufficed him. His wife, and, after her, his daughter, had failed to alter the habits of his youth when he served as a stockman, and later as a boss stockman.
“Ah! By the look of things we are going to do ourselves well to-day,” he said cheerfully.
“Of course,” she agreed emphatically, smiling up at him. “You would not expect me to be satisfied with a thick slice of bread and an equally thick slice of salt meat, would you?”
“Hardly. What’s sauce for the old gander would be sandstone for the young goose. However, I am not sure that elegant living is good for a man. I have noticed lately a touch of indigestion. I never had that when I lived on damper and salt meat and jet-black tea.”
“Probably not, Dad; but you now have a touch of indigestion because you once lived on those things,” she countered swiftly. “Pour out my tea, please, before it becomes ink-black.”
Nettlefold was happy because his daughter was with him, and she was happy because he was so. Elizabeth was not the bush lover that her father was. The bush had “got” him in its alluring toils, but she had resisted it and, having resisted, escaped it. Paradoxically, she found no love for the bush, and yet hated the city.
The meal eaten, he gallantly lit her cigarette, and, with his pipe alight, began to pack away the luncheon things. She watched him, her eyes guarded with lowered lids, and told herself how fine was this simple, generous father of hers. It was understood that when she was out on the run with him she was his guest, staying at his country house, as he put it, and as his guest she was not to do any of the chores.
Then on again, through the gate into the great Emu Lake paddock, a fenced area eighteen miles square. The stock having been excluded for two years, the grasses lay beneath the sun like turned oats. Patches of healthy scrub encumbered the undulating grasslands like dark, rocky islands. Here in this paddock sheltered for two years, the kangaroos were numerous; and, on nearing a bore-head, the travellers were greeted by a vast flock of galah parrots.
Every twenty-four hours seven hundred thousand gallons of water hotly gushed from the bore-head to run away for miles along the channel scooped to carry it. Years before, when the bore first had been sunk to tap the artesian reservoir, the flow was nearly eleven hundred thousand gallons every twenty-four hours.
Day and night, year in and year out, the stream spouted hot from the iron casing to run down the channel now edged with the snow-white soda suds. Not within half a mile of the bore could cattle drink the water, so hot and so loaded with alkalies was it.
Nettlefold drove the car beside the channel for some distance before turning to the north along an old and faint track. About ten minutes after leaving the bore stream they emerged from dense scrub and were on the dry, perfectly flat bottom of a shallow ground depression from which the paddock was named. It was edged, this waterless lake, with a shore of white, cement-hard claypan lying like a bridal ribbon at the foot of swamp gums crowned with brilliant green foliage. The girl uttered a sharp