"Only a pal," they will say, towering strong
and protecting; and the woman feels uplifted, even though in the same
breath they have honestly agreed with her, after careful scrutiny, that
it is not her fault that she was born into the plain sisterhood. Bushmen
will risk their lives for a woman pal or otherwise but leave her to pick
up her own handkerchief.
"Of course!" Mac added, as an afterthought. "It's not often they find a
pal in a woman"; and I add to-day that when they do, that woman is to be
envied her friends.
"Eyes front!" Mac shouted suddenly, and in a moment the homestead was in
sight, and the front gate forty-five miles behind us. "If ever you DO
reach the homestead alive," the Darwin ladies had said; and now they were
three hundred miles away from us to the north-west.
"Sam's spotted us!" Mac smiled as we skimmed on, and a slim little
Chinaman ran across between the buildings. "We'd better do the thing in
style," and whipping up the horses, he whirled them through the open
slip-rails, past the stockyards, away across the grassy homestead
enclosure, and pulled up with a rattle of hoofs and wheels at the head of
a little avenue of buildings.
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