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Rh CHAPTER XXI

CASTLE SULLIVAN

new groom rubbed his eyes in the moonlight. He could have laughed aloud. English castles he had seen, Irish castles he had heard about, but what was this? A jumble of slab-huts upon the right, and facing these a wooden, one-storied, rectilinear eyesore: three sides house, the fourth a formidable palisade, and in their midst an arid courtyard overlooked by French windows and glass doors. No creeper clung to the whitened walls. No shrub softened the rigid angles of the yard, and the verandah was too shallow for real shade. Yet the site had been chosen on a ridge of red gums that had been left unfelled beyond the palisade, and rustled restfully above the slab-huts opposite, rendering the latter the more inviting quarter of the two.

The riders dismounted at a gate in the palisade, and as young Sullivan led the way into the courtyard, a tall bent figure, in a frogged coat and a plaited straw hat, stepped down from the verandah, and then stood still.

“What’s this?” cried an arrogant and aged voice. “Only one, eh? What have you done with the other two?”

“Couldn’t get them, sir,” responded Mr. Nat in a tone quite new to Tom. It was a very model of filial respect and dutiful subservience.

“‘Couldn’t get them, sir!’ Why, what d’ye mean?” the old man thundered. “We applied for two labourers and a groom. Why couldn’t you get them?”

“The fact is, I did,” stammered Nat; “only two out