Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/375

 was here! What beats me most is your own audacity in marching out, as you say, without the least premeditation, and therefore presumably without any sort or shape of disguise?"

Jan took his courage between his teeth.

"I not only walked out of your own door, sir, but I went and walked out in your own coat and hat!"

Heriot flushed and flashed. He could not have been the martinet he was without seeing himself as such, and for the moment in a light injurious to that essential quality. Then he laughed heartily, but not very long, and his laughter left him grave.

"You were an awful young fool, you know! It would have been the end of you, without the option of a præpostors' licking, if not with one from me thrown in! But you may tell Dudley Relton, when you see him out there, that I'm glad to know what a debt I've owed him these last three years. I won't write to him, in case I might say something else while I was about it. But Lord! I do envy you both the crack you'll have in those forsaken wilds!"

Mr. Heriot perhaps pictured the flourishing port of Geelong as a bush township, only celebrated for Dudley Relton and his young barbarians. Colonial geography, unlike that of Ancient Greece, was not then a recognised item in the public-school curriculum. It may be now; but on the whole it is more probable that Mr. Heriot was having a little dig at the land to which he grudged Jan Rutter even more than Dudley Relton. And Jan really was going to the wilderness, or a lodge therein where one of the uncles on his mother's side ran sheep by the hundred thousand. It was said to be a good opening. Jan liked the letters he had read and the photographs he had and if that uncle proved a patch on the one in the Indian