ntered branding
tallies and posted the station log, was in the Old Humpey, and two or
three bachelor bedrooms opposite the wing with kitchen and store. But
Lady Bridget lived chiefly in the new house--less picturesque with its
zinc roofing and deficiency of green drapings, but, being built on sawn
lengths of saplings, more or less fortified against snakes. In front
there was a great vacant space between the ground and the floor of the
house--pleasant enough in summer, when a gentle draught could find its
way through the cracks between the boards, but cold in winter, though
the northern winters were not sharp enough or long enough for this to
be a serious discomfort.

Nor, when Lady Bridget slept alone in the new house, did she mind much
the dogs and harmless animals that couched under the boards, they gave
her a sense of companionship. But there was a herd of goats--some of
them old and with big tough horns--which McKeith had started in his
bachelor days to provide milk when, as sometimes happened, the milch
cows failed; also to furnish savoury messes of kid's flesh--a pleasant
change from the eternal salt beef varied with wild duck. Occasionally
it happened, especially in mustering times, that nobody remembered to
pen the goats in their yard by the lagoon, and on these occasions they
would get under the house, and the noise of their horns knocking
against the floor of her bedroom would so effectively destroy Lady
Bridget's chances of sleep that she would rise in the night and drive
them into their fold. These were incidents which added variety to the
monotony of her life in the Bush.

The head-station was very quiet one afternoon, most of the hands being
out with the tailing mob; and Lady Bridget, in a restless mood, went
for a roam through the bush. She walked past the Chinamen's garden and
Fo Wung, carrying up buckets of water to his young cabbages, stopped to
smile blandly and report on his produce. But she was in no mood for the
interchange of remarks in pidgin English.

It was lonelier at the head of the lagoon. She could hear the trumpeter
geese tuning up in shrill cornet-like notes and the discordant shriek
of native-companions, as the long-legged grey birds stalked
consequentially at the water's edge. She disturbed a flock of parrots
in the white cedar tree, and a covey of duck rose with a whirring of
pinions and a mighty quacking, shaking the drips off their plumage so
that they glittered like diamonds in t