. . . I say, Dick! Yes, it's me right enough, and not my
ghost. The old bad egg come back to roost!"
The blind was raised; and the friends, who had last met in the dingy
bush hut on the night of the Stockade, stood face to face. And now
ensued a babel of greeting, a quick fire of question and answer, the two
voices going in and out and round each other, singly and together, like
the voices in a duet. Tears rose to Polly's eyes as she listened; it
made her heart glow to see Richard so glad. But when, forgetting her
presence, Purdy cried: "And I must confess, Dick. . . . I took a kiss
from Mrs. Polly. Gad, old man, how she's come on!" Polly hastily retired
to the kitchen.
At table the same high spirits prevailed: it did not often happen that
Richard was brought out of his shell like this, thought Polly
gratefully, and heaped her visitor's plate to the brim. His first hunger
stilled, Purdy fell to giving a slapdash account of his experiences. He
kept to no orderly sequence, but threw them out just as they occurred to
him: a rub with bushrangers in the Black Forest, his adventures as a
long-distance drover in the Mildura, the trials of a week he had spent
in a boiling-down establishment on the Murray: "Where the stink wa so
foul, you two, that I vomited like a dog every day!" Under the force of
this Odyssey husband and wife gradually dropped into silence, which they
broke only by single words of astonishment and sympathy; while the child
Trotty spooned in her pudding without seeing it, her round, solemn eyes
fixed unblinkingly on this new uncle, who was like a wonderful
story-book come alive.
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