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Tom Hall and one or two others went out hurriedly to have a drink. But we all loved the Giraffe.

He was very innocent and very humorous, especially when he meant to be most serious and philosophical.

“Some of them bush girls is regular tomboys,” he said to me solemnly one day. “Some of them is too cheeky altogether. I remember once I was stoppin’ at a place–they was sort of relations o’ mine–an’ they put me to sleep in a room off the verander, where there was a glass door an’ no blinds. An’ the first mornin’ the girls–they was sort o’ cousins o’ mine–they come gigglin’ and foolin’ round outside the door on the verander, an’ kep’ me in bed till nearly ten o’clock. I had to put me trowsis on under the bed-clothes in the end. But I got back on ’em the next night,” he reflected.

“How did you do that, Bob?” I asked.

“Why, I went to bed in me trowsis!”

One day I was on a plank, painting the ceiling of the bar of the Great Western Hotel. I was anxious to get the job finished. The work had been kept back most of the day by chaps handing up long beers to me, and drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the paint wrong side out. I was slapping it on over the last few boards when:

“I’m very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin’ yer; but there’s that there woman and them girls—“

I looked down–about the first time I had looked down on him–and there was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two half-crowns in it.

“Oh, that’s all right, Bob,” I said, and I dropped in half a crown.

There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word, who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town. There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and turned out by their landlord.

“This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe,” said one of the shearers. “Them —s has made enough out of us coves. They’ve got plenty of stuff, don’t you fret. Let ’em go to —! I’m blanked if I give a sprat.”

“They ain’t got their fares to Sydney,” said the Giraffe. “An’, what’s more, the little ‘un is sick, an’ two of them has kids in Sydney.”

“How the — do you know?”

“Why, one of ’em come to me an’ told me all about it.”

There was an involuntary guffaw.

“Look here, Bob,” said Billy Woods, the rouseabouts’ secretary, kindly. “Don’t you make a fool of yourself. You’ll have all the chaps laughing at you. Those girls are only working you for all you’re worth. I suppose one of ’em came crying and whining to you. Don’t you bother about ’em. You don’t know ’em; they can pump water at a moment’s notice. You haven’t had any experience with women yet, Bob.”

“She didn’t come whinin’ and cryin’ to me,” said the Giraffe, dropping his twanging drawl a little. “She looked me straight in the face an’ told me all about it.”

“I say, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks, “what have you been doin’? You’ve bin down there on the nod. I’m surprised at yer, Giraffe.”

“An’ he pretends to be so gory soft an’ innocent, too,” growled the Bogan. “We know all about you, Giraffe.”

“Look here, Giraffe,” said Mitchell the shearer. “I’d never have thought it of you. We all thought you were the only virgin youth west the river; I always thought you were a moral young man. You mustn’t think that because your conscience is pricking you everyone else’s is.”