Page:Hornung - Irralies Bushranger.djvu/53

 On Sundays her young brothers ran up the horses; she heard their spurs in the veranda, their voices thick with biscuit, and finally their ponies cantering toward the horse-paddock gate. Irralie had then just shut her door; and when next she opened it the boys were returning with the drove of horses in a cloud of sand. The thunder of their hoofs was like the charge of cavalry, with stock-whips cracking for musketry. Nor was it possible to see and hear it for the thousandth time and to harbor one moment longer the preposterous notions of the night.

She walked round the house. The Chinaman was smoking his early morning pipe and bringing wood from the wood-heap for the kitchen fire. Irralie was greeted on every hand with the reassurance of the normal and the unromantic. A couple of chairs stood side by side on the veranda, an empty glass within reach of either. It was as though Irralie had seen her father and the owner drain and rise and part for the night