Children of the Bush | Page 7

religious prejudices, and tempt us to take a morbid interest in sick Chows and Afghans, and blacklegs and widows; but when he starts mixing us up with strange women it's time to buck." And he prospected his pockets and contributed two shillings, some odd pennies, and a pinch of tobacco dust.
"I don't mind helping the girls, but I'm damned if I'll give a penny to help the old---," said Tom Hall.
"Well, she was a girl once herself," drawled the Giraffe.
The Giraffe went round to the other pubs and to the union offices, and when he returned he seemed satisfied with the plate, but troubled about something else.
"I don't know what to do for them for to-night," he said. "None of the pubs or boardin'-houses will hear of them, an' there ain't no empty houses, an' the women is all agen 'em."
"Not all," said Alice, the big, handsome barmaid from Sydney. "Come here, Bob." She gave the Giraffe half a sovereign and a look for which some of us would have paid him ten pounds--had we had the money, and had the look been transferable.
"Wait a minute, Bob," she said, and she went in to speak to the landlord.
"There's an empty bedroom at the end of the store in the yard," she said when she came back. "They can camp there for to-night if they behave themselves. You'd better tell 'em, Bob."
"Thank yer, Alice," said the Giraffe.
Next day, after work, the Giraffe and I drifted together and down by the river in the cool of the evening, and sat on the edge of the steep, drought-parched bank.
"I heard you saw your lady friends off this morning, Bob," I said, and was sorry I said it, even before he answered.
"Oh, they ain't no friends of mine," he said. "Only four' poor devils of women. I thought they mightn't like to stand waitin' with the crowd on the platform, so I jest offered to get their tickets an' told 'em to wait round at the back of the station till the bell rung. . . . An' what do yer think they did, Harry?" he went on, with an exasperatingly unintelligent grin. "Why, they wanted to kiss me."
"Did they?"
"Yes. An' they would have done it, too, if I hadn't been so long. . . . Why, I'm blessed if they didn't kiss me hands."
"You don't say so."
"God's truth. Somehow I didn't like to go on the platform with them after that; besides, they was cryin', and I can't stand women cryin'. But some of the chaps put them into an empty carriage." He thought a moment. Then:
"There's some terrible good-hearted fellers in the world," he reflected.
I thought so too. "Bob," I said, "you're a single man. Why don't you get married and settle down?"
"Well," he said, "I ain't got no wife an' kids, that's a fact. But it ain't my fault."
He may have been right about the wife. But I thought of the look that Alice had given him, and---
"Girls seem to like me right enough," he said, "but it don't go no further than that. The trouble is that I'm so long, and I always seem to get shook after little girls. At least there was one little girl in Bendigo that I was properly gone on."
"And wouldn't she have you?"
"Well, it seems not."
"Did you ask her?"
"Oh, yes, I asked her right enough."
"Well, and what did she say?"
"She said it would be redicilus for her to be seen trottin' alongside of a chimbley like me."
"Perhaps she didn't mean that. There are any amount of little women who like tall men."
"I thought of that too--afterwards. P'r'aps she didn't mean it that way. I s'pose the fact of the matter was that she didn't cotton on to me, and wanted to let me down easy. She didn't want to hurt me feelin's, if yer understand--she was a very good-hearted little girl. There's some terrible tall fellers where I come from, and I know two as married little girls."
He seemed a hopeless case.
"Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I wish that I wasn't so blessed long."
"There's that there deaf jackaroo," he reflected presently. "He's something in the same fig about girls as I am. He's too deaf and I'm too long."
"How do you make that out?" I asked. "He's got three girls, to my knowledge, and, as for being deaf, why, he gasses more than any man in the town, and knows more of what's going on than old Mother Brindle the washerwoman."
"Well, look at that now!" said the Giraffe, slowly. "Who'd have thought it? He never told me he had three girls, an' as for hearin' news, I always tell him anything that's goin' on that I think he doesn't catch. He told me his trouble was that whenever he went out with a girl people