You'll be tired my dear--and you
must be feeling strange,' he added kindly. 'I'll go and have your traps
brought up and leave you to fix yourself. I want to see one or two
chaps and find out whether my drays are down as far as Fig Tree for
stores and what's going on up along the Leura.'

Bridget noticed that the change in McKeith seemed yet more accentuated.
His manner was more curt and decided--rougher than before. He appeared
to have taken on the tone of the Back-Blocks. Yet she admired him. She
did not dislike the roughness.

But she felt a womanish aggrievement at his having left her to undo her
own things. And the rooms were horrible--the meagre appliances--the
course cotton sheets, the awful Reckitt's-blue colouring of the painted
walls. And then the dreadful noise of the men drinking below in the
bar! If this was the Bush! But Colin had said it was not the Bush.

He left her again after dinner which was horrible likewise--burned up
steak, messy fried potatoes and cabbage, an uneatable rice pudding. He
did not seem to mind. The result of his enquiries had left him grim and
preoccupied. Yes, he had taken on the Bushman, and had more or less
dropped the lover. The practical Scotch side of him was uppermost, and
he appeared more disturbed over station affairs than at her want of
appetite. She resented this unreasonably. She had not wanted him to
play the lover in these surroundings, they would have been fatal to
romance, but she had not bargained for his glumness. He was angry at
the non-arrival of his draymen and the probability that they were
drinking at a grog-shanty on the road. He would certainly sack them, he
said if that were the case. And he had disquieting news from Moongarr.
Pleuro had broken out among the cattle. What was Pleuro? Lady Bridget
wondered, but she was not sufficiently interested in cattle to ask the
question. And the Unionist labour men were making themselves a
nuisance--going round the stations burning the grass of squatters who
employed non-Union stockmen and shearers--in one instance, threatening
to burn a woolshed. And there hadn't been any rain on the Leura for a
month past, and weather prophets were predicting a drought.

It was dreadfully prosaic and boring. After he had gone out again to
transact further business, Lady Bridget went to bed and squirmed
between the cotton sheets, remembering ruefully the luxuries of
Government House. Never in all her life had she slept between cotton