Page:Over the Sliprails - 1900.djvu/117

 Mount Buckaroo standing clear, they went to the back door, which opened opposite the end of the shed, and saw to the east a glorious arch of steel-blue, starry sky, with the distant peaks showing clear and blue away back under the far-away stars in the depth of it.

They lingered awhile—arms round each other’s waists—before she called the boys, just as they had done this time of night twenty years ago, after the boys’ grandmother had called her.

“Awlright, mother!” bawled back the boys, with unfilial independence of Australian youth. “We’re awlright! We’ll be in directly! Wasn’t it a pelterer, mother?”

They went in and sat down again. The embarrassment began to wear off.

“We’ll get out of this, Mary,” said Johnny. “I’ll take Mason’s offer for the cattle and things, and take that job of Dawson’s, boss or no boss”—(Johnny’s bad luck was due to his inability in the past to “get on” with any boss for any reasonable length of time)—“I can get the boys on, too. They’re doing no good here, and growing up. It ain’t doing justice to them; and, what’s more, this life is killin’ you, Mary. That settles it! I was blind. Let the jumpt-up selection go! It’s making a wall-eyed bullock of me, Mary—a dry-rotted rag of a wall-eyed bullock like Jimmy Nowlett’s old Strawberry. And you’ll live in town like a lady.”

“Somebody coming!” yelled the boys.

There was a clatter of sliprails hurriedly thrown down, and clipped by horses’ hoofs.