Old associations with him had been vividly reawakened by this visit to
the home of her youth. She remembered, as if it had been yesterday, how
McKeith, a raw youth of eighteen with a horrible tragedy at the back of
his young life, had been picked up by her father and brought to
Bungroopim to learn the work of a cattle-station. . . . hitherto his
experience, such as it was, had been with sheep in the, then, unsettled
north. Joan was herself a girl in short frocks, three or four years
younger than Colin McKeith, and with no apparent prospect of ever
crossing the 'big fella Water,' as the Ubi Blacks called it, or of
joining the band of Bohemian scribblers in London.

She remembered how quickly Colin had learned his work--remembered how
the shy self-contained lad, with always that grim memory of his boyhood
shaping a vengeful purpose in his mind and making him old for his
years, had developed the flair of the Bush in his hardy Scotch
constitution. She was compelled to own that he had developed, too, some
of the worst as well as the best of those Scotch qualities inherited
from his parents, expatriated though they had been, and from the
staunch clansmen behind them. He had the Scotch loyalty; likewise, the
Scotch tenacity of character which never forgot and very seldom
forgave; the Scotch obstinacy of purpose and opinion; the Scotch
acquisitiveness; a tendency too to 'nearness' in matters of small
expenditure which combined oddly with a generosity amounting almost to
recklessness in large enterprise. It was on the whole not a bad outfit
for a pioneer who meant to get on in his world.

The beginnings were small, but indicative of the trend of his career.
He contrived, even when he was earning no salary but working only for
his 'tucker,' to get together a horse or two, a cow or two, a specially