第80章

Not a pleasant letter, by no manner of means.I was glad I didn't get it while I was eating my heart out under the stifling low roof of the cell at Nomah, or when I was bearing my load at Berrima.A few pounds more when the weight was all I could bear and live would have crushed the heart out of me.I didn't want anything to cross me when I was looking at mother and Aileen and thinking how, between us, we'd done everything our worst enemy could have wished us to do.But here, when there was plenty of time to think over old days and plan for the future, I could bear the savage, spiteful sound of the whole letter and laugh at the way she had got out of her troubles by taking up with a rough old fellow whose cheque-book was the only decent thing about him.I wasn't sorry to be rid of her either.Since I'd seen Gracey Storefield again every other woman seemed disagreeable to me.I tore up the letter and threw it away, hoping I had done for ever with a woman that no man living would ever have been the better for.

`Glad you take it so quiet,' Jim says, after holding his tongue longer than he did mostly.`She's a bad, cold-hearted jade, though she is Jeanie's sister.If I thought my girl was like her she'd never have another thought from me, but she isn't, and never was.

The worse luck I've had the closer she's stuck to me, like a little brick as she is.I'd give all I ever had in the world if I could go to her and say, "Here I am, Jim Marston, without a penny in the world, but I can look every man in the face, and we'll work our way along the road of life cheerful and loving together."But I CAN'T say it, Dick, that's the devil of it, and it makes me so wild sometimes that I could knock my brains out against the first ironbark tree I come across.'

I didn't say anything, but I took hold of Jim's hand and shook it.

We looked in each other's eyes for a minute; there was no call to say anything.We always understood one another, Jim and I.

As we were safe to stop in the Hollow for long spells at a time we took a good look over it, as far as we could do on foot.

We found a rum sort of place at the end of a long gully that went easterly from the main flat.In one way you'd think the whole valley had been an arm of the sea some time or other.It was a bit like Sydney Harbour in shape, with one principal valley and no end of small cover and gullies running off from it, and winding about in all directions.

Even the sandstone walls, by which the whole affair, great and small, was hemmed in, were just like the cliff about South Head;there were lines, too, on the face of them, Jim and I made out, just like where the waves had washed marks and levels on the sea-rock.

We didn't trouble ourselves much about that part of it.

Whatever might have been there once, it grew stunning fine grass now, and there was beautiful clear fresh water in all the creeks that ran through it.

Well, we rambled up the long, crooked gully that I was talking about till about half-way up it got that narrow that it seemed stopped by a big rock that had tumbled down from the top and blocked the path.It was pretty well grown over with wild raspberries and climbers.

`No use going farther,' says Jim; `there's nothing to see.'

`I don't know that.Been a track here some time.Let's get round and see.'

When we got round the rock the track was plain again; it had been well worn once, though neither foot nor hoof much had been along it for many a year.It takes a good while to wear out a track in a dry country.

The gully widened out bit by bit, till at last we came to a little round green flat, right under the rock walls which rose up a couple of thousand feet above it on two sides.

On the flat was an old hut -- very old it seemed to be, but not in bad trim for all that.The roof was of shingles, split, thick, and wedge shaped; the walls of heavy ironbark slabs, and there was a stone chimney.