more definite track, "and he'll be all right as soon as he gets used to
it. Never knew such a chap for finding something decent in everybody he
strikes." Naturally I hoped he would "find something decent in me,"
having learned what it meant to the stockmen to have a woman pitchforked
into their daily lives, when those lives were to be lived side by side,
in camp, or in saddle, or at the homestead.


Mac hesitated a moment, and then out flashed one of his happy
inspirations. "Don't you bother about the Dandy," he said; "bushmen have a
sixth sense, and know a pal when they see one."

Just a bushman's pretty speech, aimed straight at the heart of a woman,
where all the pretty speeches of the bushfolk are aimed; for it is by the
heart that they judge us. "Only a pal," they will say, towering strong
and protecting; and the woman feels uplifted, even though in the same
breath they have honestly agreed with her, after careful scrutiny, that
it is not her fault that she was born into the plain sisterhood. Bushmen
will risk their lives for a woman pal or otherwise but leave her to pick
up her own handkerchief.


"Of course!" Mac added, as an afterthought. "It's not often they find a
pal in a woman"; and I add to-day that when they do, that woman is to be
envied her friends.

"Eyes front!" Mac shouted suddenly, and in a moment the homestead was in
sight, and the front gate forty-five miles behind us. "If ever you DO
reach the homestead alive," the Darwin ladies had said; and now they were
three hundred miles away from us to the north-west.