could have done it
himself.

The air was heavy with scent. All round the great quadrangle of the
house acacia trees were in bloom, and the bees were working busily among
the mignonette and roses in front of the office door.

Hugh Gordon was a lithe, wiry young Australian with intensely sunburnt
face and hands, and a drooping black moustache; a man with a healthy,
breezy outdoor appearance, but the face of an artist, a dreamer, and a
thinker, rather than that of a practical man. His brother Charlie
and he, though very much alike in face, were quite different types of
manhood. Charlie, from his earliest school-days, had never read a book
except under compulsion, had never stayed indoors when he could possibly
get out, had never obeyed an unwelcome order when by force or fraud he
could avoid doing so, and had never written a letter in his life when
a telegram would do. He took the world as it came, having no particular
amount of imagination, and never worried himself. Hugh, on the other
hand, was inclined to meet trouble half-way, and to make troubles where
none existed, which is the worst misfortune that a man can be afflicted
with.

Hugh walked to the door and gazed out over the garden and homestead,
down the long stretch of green paddocks where fat cattle were standing
under the trees, too well fed to bother themselves with looking for
grass. He looked beyond all this to the long drab-coloured stretch of
road that led to Kiley's, watching for the mailboy's arrival. The mail
was late, for the melting snow had flooded the mountain creeks, and Hugh
knew it was quite likely that little Patsy Donohoe, the mail-boy, had
been blocked at Donohoe's Hotel for two days, unable to cross Kiley's
River. This had happened often, and on various occasions when Patsy had
crossed, he, pony and all, had been swept down quite a quarter of a
mile in the ice-cold water before they could reach land. But that was an
ordinary matter in the spring, and it was a point of honour with Patsy
and all his breed not to let the elements beat them in carrying out
the mail contract, which they tendered for every year, and in which no
outsider would have dared to compete.

At last Hugh's vigil was rewarded by the appearance of a small and
wild-looking boy, mounted on a large and wild-looking horse. The boy
was about twelve years of age, and had just ridden a half-broken horse a
forty-mile journey--for of such is the youth of Australia. Patsy was
wet a