"Good Lord!" said Carew, looking at the two little figures, who had
now a couple of ducks each, a puftalooner or two, and a big pannikin
of tea, and were sitting on the edge of the verandah eating away
with great enjoyment; "what have they been doing with the cattle
to-day?"
"Minding them lest the wild ones should clear out. They dropped
their matches somehow; that's what fetched 'em home early. They'll
have to sleep on the verandah to-night. We'll make that their
boodore, as they say in France."
The dark was now falling; the sunlight had left long, faint, crimson
streaks in the sky. The air was perceptibly cooler, and flights
of waterfowl hurried overhead, making their way to the river. The
Chinaman lighted a slush-lamp, by whose flickering light Charlie
produced from his swag a small bundle of papers, and threw them on
the table.
"We might as well get our business over, Keogh," he said. "I've
got the paper here for you to sign, making over your interest in
the block and the cattle, and all that."
He pored over the document, muttering as he read it. "Your name'll
have to be filled in, and there's a blank for the name of the person
it's transferred to."
"That'll be Mr. Grant's name," suggested Carew.
"I don't know so much about that," said Charlie. "I don't think,
if a man has a mortgage over a place, that he can take it in his
own name. That fool Pinnock didn't tell me. He was too anxious
to know how we got on with the larrikins to give me any useful
information. Anyhow, I'll fill in my own name--for all the block
is worth I ain't likely to steal it. I can transfer it to Mr. Grant
afterwards."
"I don't care," said the old man indifferently, "I'll transfer my
interest to anyone you like. I'm done with it. I'm signing away
fifteen of the best years of my life. But my name ain't Keogh, you
know, though I always went by that. My father died when I was a
kiddy, and my mother married again, so I got called by my stepfather's
name all my life. This is my right name, and it's a poor man's
name to-day." And as the two men bent over him in the light of the
flickering slush-lamp, he wrote, with stiff, uncertain fingers,
"Patrick Henry Considine."