Children of the Bush | Page 6

there's that there woman and them girls---"
I looked down--about the first time I had looked down on him--and
there was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two
half-crowns in it.
"Oh, that's all right, Bob," I said, and I dropped in half a crown.
There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some
barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were
strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word,
who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had
taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town.
There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their
establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and
turned out by their landlord.
"This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe," said one of the shearers. "Them ---s
has made enough out of us coves. They've got plenty of stuff, don't you
fret. Let 'em go to ---! I'm blanked if I give a sprat."
"They ain't got their fares to Sydney," said the Giraffe. "An', what's
more, the little 'un is sick, an' two of them has kids in Sydney."
"How the --- do you know?"
"Why, one of 'em come to me an' told me all about it."
There was an involuntary guffaw.

"Look here, Bob," said Billy Woods, the rouseabouts' secretary, kindly.
"Don't you make a fool of yourself. You'll have all the chaps laughing
at you. Those girls are only working you for all you're worth. I suppose
one of 'em came crying and whining to you. Don't you bother about 'em.
You don't know 'em; they can pump water at a moment's notice. You
haven't had any experience with women yet, Bob."
"She didn't come whinin' and cryin' to me," said the Giraffe, dropping
his twanging drawl a little. "She looked me straight in the face an' told
me all about it."
"I say, Giraffe," said Box-o'-Tricks, "what have you been doin'? You've
bin down there on the nod. I'm surprised at yer, Giraffe."
"An' he pretends to be so gory soft an' innocent, too," growled the
Bogan. "We know all about you, Giraffe."
"Look here, Giraffe," said Mitchell the shearer. "I'd never have thought
it of you. We all thought you were the only virgin youth west the river;
I always thought you were a moral young man. You mustn't think that
because your conscience is pricking you everyone else's is."
"I ain't had anythin' to do with them," said the Giraffe, drawling again.
"I ain't a cove that goes in for that sort of thing. But other chaps has,
and I think they might as well help 'em out of their fix."
"They're a rotten crowd," said Billy Woods. "You don't know them,
Bob. Don't bother about them-they're not worth it. Put your money in
your pocket. You'll find a better use for it before next shearing."
"Better shout, Giraffe," said Box-o'-Tricks.
Now in spite of the Giraffe's softness he was the hardest man in Bourke
to move when he'd decided on what he thought was "the fair thing to
do." Another peculiarity of his was that on occasion, such for instance
as "sayin' a few words" at a strike meeting, he would straighten himself,
drop the twang, and rope in his drawl, so to speak.
"Well, look here, you chaps," he said now. "I don't know anything
about them women. I s'pose they're bad, but I don't suppose they're
worse than men has made them. All I know is that there's four women
turned out, without any stuff, and every woman in Bourke, an' the
police, an' the law agen 'em. An' the fact that they is women is agenst
'em most of all. You don't expect 'em to hump their swags to Sydney!
Why, only I ain't got the stuff I wouldn't trouble yer. I'd pay their fares
meself. Look," he said, lowering his voice, "there they are now, an' one

of the girls is cryin'. Don't let 'em see yer lookin'."
I dropped softly from the plank and peeped out with the rest.
They stood by the fence on the opposite side of the street, a bit up
towards the railway station, with their portmanteaux and bundles at
their feet. One girl leant with her arms on the fence rail and her face
buried in them, another was trying to comfort her. The third girl and the
woman stood facing our way. The woman was good-looking; she had a
hard face, but it might have been made hard. The third girl seemed half
defiant, half inclined to cry. Presently she went to the other side of the
girl who was crying on