Again and again he picked him up and carried him home; till
that night when no puss came to his call, and Palmerston, the black and
glossy, was seen no more: either he had fallen down a shaft, or been
mangled by a dog, or stolen, cats still fetching a high price on
Ballarat.
The window of Mahony's room faced a wide view: not a fence, hardly a bit
of scrub or a tuft of grass-tree marked the bare expanse of uneven
ground, now baked brown as a piecrust by the December sun. He looked
across it to the cemetery. This was still wild and unfenced--just a
patch of rising ground where it was permissible to bury the dead. Only
the day before--the second anniversary of the Eureka Stockade--he had
watched some two to three hundred men, with crepe on their hats and
sleeves, a black-draped pole at their head, march there to do homage to
their fallen comrades. The dust raised by the shuffling of these many
feet had accompanied the procession like a moving cloud; had lingered in
its rear like the smoke from a fire. Drays and lorries crawled for ever
laboriously along it, seeming glued to the earth by the monstrous sticky
heat of the veiled sun. Further back rose a number of bald hills--
rounded, swelling hills, shaped like a woman's breasts. And behind all,
pale china-blue against the tense white sky, was the embankment of the
distant ranges. Except for these, an ugly, uninviting outlook, and one
to which he seldom lifted his eyes.
His room pleased him better.
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