Page:Over the Sliprails - 1900.djvu/131

 though two thousand miles away—till that message came.

I can imagine Tome sitting with his mates round the billy, they talking in quiet, subdued tones about the track, the departure of coaches, trains and boats—arranging for Tom’s journey East, and the working of the claim in his absence. Or Tom lying on his back in his bunk, with his hands under his head and his eyes fixed on the calico above—thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking, with a touch of his boyhood’s faith perhaps; or wondering what he had done in his long, hard-working married life, that God should do this thing to him now, of all times.

“You’d best take what money we have in the camp, Tom; you’ll want it all ag’in’ the time you get back from Sydney, and we can fix it up arterwards. … There’s a couple o’ clean shirts o’ mine—you’d best take ‘em—you’ll want ‘em on the voyage. … You might as well take them there new pants o’ mine, they’ll only dry-rot out here—and the coat, too, if you like—it’s too small for me, anyway. You won’t have any time in Perth, and you’ll want some decent togs to land with in Sydney.”

“I wouldn’t ‘a’ cared so much if I’d ‘a’ seen the last of her,” he said, in a quiet, patient voice, to us one night by the rail. “I would ‘a’ liked to have seen the last of her.”

“Have you been long in the West?”

“Over two years. I made up to take a run across last Christmas, and have a look at ‘em. But I couldn’t