ndy (his skin
was pink to scarlet in some weathers, with blotches of umber), and his
eyes were pale-grey; his big forehead loomed babyishly, his arms were
short, and his legs bowed to the saddle. Altogether he was an awkward,
unlovely Bush bird--on foot; in the saddle it was different. He hadn't
even a 'temper'.

The impression on Job's mind which many years afterwards brought about
the incident was strong enough. When Job was a boy of fourteen he saw
his father's horse come home riderless--circling and snorting up by the
stockyard, head jerked down whenever the hoof trod on one of the snapped
ends of the bridle-reins, and saddle twisted over the side with bruised
pommel and knee-pad broken off.

Job's father wasn't hurt much, but Job's mother, an emotional woman, and
then in a delicate state of health, survived the shock for three months
only. 'She wasn't quite right in her head,' they said, 'from the day
the horse came home till the last hour before she died.' And, strange to
say, Job's father (from whom Job inherited his seemingly placid nature)
died three months later. The doctor from the town was of the opinion
that he must have 'sustained internal injuries' when the horse threw
him. 'Doc. Wild' (eccentric Bush doctor) reckoned that Job's father was
hurt inside when his wife died, and hurt so badly that he couldn't pull
round. But doctors differ all over the world.

Well, the story of Job himself came about in this way. He had been
married a year, and had lately started wool-raising on a pastoral lease
he had taken up at Talbragar: it was a new run, with new slab-and-bark
huts on the creek for a homestead, new shearing-shed, yards--wife and
everything new, and he was expecting a baby. Job felt brand-new himself
at the time, so he said. It was a lonely place for a young woman;
but Gerty was a settler's daughter. The newness took away some of the
loneliness, she said, and there was truth in that: a Bush home in the
scrubs looks lonelier the older it gets, and ghostlier in the twilight,
as the bark and slabs whiten, or rather grow grey, in fierce summers.
And there's nothing under God's sky so weird, so aggressively lonely, as
a deserted old home in the Bush.

Job's wife had a half-caste gin for company when Job was away on the
run, and the nearest white woman (a hard but honest Lancashire woman
from within the kicking radius in Lancashire--wife of a selector) was
only seven miles away. She promised to be on han