Such Is Life by Joseph Furphy (children's books read aloud .TXT) 📕

Queensland,” remarked the stranger, who had been watching Moriarty’s flies, without the trace of a smile on his saturnine face. “I met him sixty or eighty mile beyond the Darling, on the Thargomindah track, three weeks ago.”

“Not the same fellow, surely?” I suggested.

“Well,” replied the stranger tolerantly, “the young chap I’m speaking of had some disfigurement of the face, so far as I could distinguish through a short crape veil; and he was carrying a box that he evidently wouldn’t trust on his packhorse, but whether it was a violin-case or a child’s coffin, I wasn’t rude enough to ask. Old-fashioned Manton single-barrel slung on his back. Good-looking black-and-tan dog. Brown saddle-horse; small star; WD conjoined, near shoulder; C or G, near flank. Bay mare, packed; JS, off shoulder; white hind-foot. Horses in rattling condition; and he was taking his time. He’d been boundary riding in the Bland country before coming here. Peculiar habit of giving his head a little toss sometimes when he spoke.”

“That’s him, right enough,” said Moriarty. “Had you a yarn with him?”

“Not much of a yarn certainly,” replied the stranger, holding his bottle up to the light while he speared a gherkin with his knife. “It was coming on evening when I met him; and, says he, ‘I’m making for the Old-man Gilgie⁠—haven’t you come past it?’ So I told him if he wanted to camp on water, he’d have to turn back five mile, and come with me to where I knew of a brackish dam. I’d just been disappointed of water, myself, at the Old-man Gilgie. It had been half-full a few days before, but a dozen of Elder’s camels had called there, carrying tucker to Mount Brown; and each of them had scoffed the full of a 400-gallon tank. Talk about camels doing without water!”⁠—Just here, though the stranger’s ordinary language was singularly quotable in character, he digressed into a searching and comprehensive curse, extending, inclusively, from Sir Thomas Elder away back along the vanishing vista of Time to the first man who had conceived the idea of utilising the camel as a beast of burden.

“So we camped late at night,” he resumed, in a relieved tone; “and this friend of yours cleared-off early in the morning. He wasn’t interested in anything but the Diamantina track, and I was nasty over the gilgie, so we didn’t yarn much. However, that chap’s no more off his head than I am. Bit odd, I daresay; but that’s nothing. I often find myself a bit odd⁠—negligent, and forgetful, and sort of imbecile⁠—but that’s a very different thing from being off your head. Why, just now, I saw your two horses in the paddock as I came up; and, if I was to be lagged for it, I couldn’t think where I had seen them before⁠—in fact, not till I recognised you. Want of sleep, I blame it on. Well, if I don’t shift, there won’t be many pickles left for my chaps. They were to boil the billy at the Balahs. Better give us another bottle.” He handed Moriarty the money for the goods, and stowed them in a small flour-bag. “So-long, boys⁠—see you again some day.” And the imbecile stranger trailed his four-inch spurs from our presence.

“Do you know him, Moriarty?” I asked.

“I can’t say I do,” replied the storekeeper. “One day, last winter, I happened to be out at the main road when he passed with 400 head of fats; and somehow I knew that his name was Spooner. Never saw him again till now. But how about Nosey Alf⁠—wasn’t I right for once?⁠—and weren’t you wrong for once?”

“So it appears,” I replied. “But you haven’t told me how you worked the scandal. You were sitting with your backs against the wall⁠—Go on⁠—”

“Sitting with our backs against the wall,” repeated my agent complacently. “Well, we began to talk about the jealousy there was amongst the station chaps on account of Jack the Shellback being picked to take Nosey’s place; and from that we got round to gossip about you stopping with Nosey the evening you left here, and wondering how you got on together, being queer in different ways. Then the conversation settled down on you; and we even quoted a remark Mrs. Beaudesart had made about you, only a couple of hours before. She had said that, though you were such a wonderful talker, you were surprisingly reticent respecting your own former life, and your family connections, and the place you came from. We commented on this remark, and laughed a bit, not at you, but at her. Clever engineering⁠—wasn’t it?”

“Not unless she was in her room, with her ear against the wall.”

“Trust her,” replied my ambassador confidently. “She saw us sitting down as she went across the yard; and we counted on her. We knew her meanness in the matter of listening.”

“Don’t say ‘meanness,’ ” I remonstrated. “I must take her part there. You can’t judge even a high-minded woman by the standard of a moderately mean man, in this particular phase of character. Our deepest student of human nature makes his favourite Beatrice, on receiving a hint, run down the garden like a lapwing, to do a bit of deliberate eavesdropping; whilst her masculine counterpart, Benedick, has to hear his share of the disclosure inadvertently and reluctantly. Similarly, in Love’s Labour Lost, when the mis-delivered letter is handed to Lord Boyet to read, he says:⁠—

This letter is mistook; it importeth none here;
It is writ to Jaquenetta.

That, of course, settles the matter in his mind; but the Princess, true to her sex, says eagerly, and with a perfectly clear conscience:⁠—

We will read it, I swear;
Break the neck of the wax, and let every one give ear.

“Don’t let us judge women by our standard here, for we can’t afford to be judged by their standard in some other⁠—”

“Hear, hear; loud applause; much laughter,” interrupted the delegate flippantly. “Well, we were yarning and laughing over Mrs. Beaudesart’s simplicity; and it came out that Nelson