“Call me John. What’s the matter with you?”
“With me!” was the indignant echo. “Nothin’sthe matter with me, young feller, exceptin ’ me arthritis and a touch of gout now and then and a hell of a dry throttle. I’ve got good health and plenty of guts, and Iain’tafeared ofraidin ’ a spirit store like you are. There’s the ruddy spirit store and I got a key to it. All I wants you to do is to go there with me after the old woman’s in bed and open the door for me ’cosI can’t get up at the lock. I tell you thereain’tnuthin ’ wrong with me.
“Nuts!” murmured the cockatoo with astonishing appropriateness. It mumbled something and then yelled: “Whatabouta drink?”
Chapter Three
The Prisoners
“Reach me down that fowl,” pleaded old Simpson. “Lemmeget the feel of his neck in me hands. They only hang him up there to mock at me and put on me the evil eye. They don’t want me to get well and be the master in me own house.”
Tears of self-pity rolled down his withered cheeks and into the unkempt white whiskers, and Bony said:
“Have you lived here very long?”
A palsied forearm was drawn across the watering eyes; the old man’s lips trembled. Bony looked away for a moment or two and then was presented with a picture of youth and virility and courage.
“Afore you was born,” came the words of the picture, “me and the old woman came here back in the year one. There was no roads to anywhere then once we left Dunkeld, only a bit of track coming through these mountains to get into Baden Park. Every mile of that track was harder than twenty miles over plain country.”
Memory was wiping away the ravages of the years, overlaying the features with a make-up to re-create a man of yesteryear. The voice lost its quavering, was steady, and the eagerness of the pioneer flared into the light blue eyes.
“I was young in them days, and the old woman was younger than me. Idruv six bullocks in a dray and shedruv four horses to a buckboard. She wascarryin ’ Alf, too. Took us all of a fortnight to make the thirty miles. I had to build two bridges in them weeks, but Kurt Benson promised me land and a fair go if we could make it.