"Sam's spotted us!" Mac smiled as we skimmed on, and a slim little
Chinaman ran across between the buildings. "We'd better do the thing in
style," and whipping up the horses, he whirled them through the open
slip-rails, past the stockyards, away across the grassy homestead
enclosure, and pulled up with a rattle of hoofs and wheels at the head of
a little avenue of buildings.

The Dandy, fresh and spotless, appeared in a doorway; black boys sprang
up like a crop of mushrooms and took charge of the buck-board; Dan
rattled in with the pack-teams, and horses were jangling hobbles and
rattling harness all about us, as I found myself standing in the shadow
of a queer, unfinished building, with the Maluka and Mac surrounded by a
mob of leaping, bounding dogs, flourishing, as best they could, another
"Welcome home!"

"Well?" Mac asked, beating off dogs at every turn. "Is it a House or a
Hut?"

"A Betwixt and Between," we decided; and then the Dandy was presented,
And the steady grey eyes apparently finding "something decent" in the
missus, with a welcoming smile and ready tact he said: "I'm sure we're
all real glad to see you." Just the tiniest emphasis on the word "you";
but that, and the quick, bright look that accompanied the emphasis, told,
as nothing else could, that it was "that other woman" that had not been
wanted. Unconventional, of course; but when a welcome is conventional
out-bush, it is unworthy of the name of welcome.

The Maluka, knew this well, but before he could speak, Mac had seized a
little half-grown dog--the most persistent of all the leaping dogs--by