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I glanced at Jack for a grin, but didn’t get one. He wore the pained expression of a man who is suddenly hit hard with the thought of something that might have been.

I boiled the billy and fried a pound of steak.

“Been travelling all night, .Tack?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Jack. “I camped at Emus yesterday.”

He didn’t eat. I began to reckon that he was brooding too much for his health. He was much thinner than when I saw him last, and pretty haggard, and he had something of the hopeless, haggard look that I’d seen in Tom Hall’s eyes after the last big shearing strike, when Tom had worked day and night to hold his mates up all through the hard, bitter struggle, and the battle was lost.

“Look here, Jack!” I said at last. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up, Harry,” said Jack. “What made you think so?”

“Have you got yourself into any fix?” I asked. “What’s the Hungerford track been doing to you?”

“No, Harry,” he said, “I’m all right. How are you?” And he pulled some string and papers and a roll of dusty pound notes from his pocket and threw them on the bunk.

I was hard up just then, so I took a note and the billy to go to the Royal and get some beer. I thought the beer might loosen his mind a bit.

“Better take a couple of quid,” said Jack. “You look as if you want some new shirts and things.” But a pound was enough for me, and I think he had reason to be glad of that later on, as it turned out.

“Anything new in Bourke?” asked Jack as we drank the beer.

“No,” I said, “not a thing–except there’s a pretty girl in the Salvation Army.”

“And it’s about time,” growled Jack.

“Now, look here, Jack,” I said presently, “what’s come over you lately at all? I might be able to help you. It’s not a bit of use telling me that there’s nothing the matter. When a man takes to brooding and travelling alone it’s a bad sign, and it will end in a leaning tree and a bit of clothes-line as likely as not. Tell me what the trouble is. Tell us all about it. There’s a ghost, isn’t there?”

“Well, I suppose so,” said Jack. “We’ve all got our ghosts for that matter. But never you mind, Harry; I’m all right. I don’t go interfering with your ghosts, and I don’t see what call you’ve got to come haunting mine. Why, it’s as bad as kicking a man’s dog.” And he gave the ghost of a grin.

“Tell me, Jack,” I said, “is it a woman?”

“Yes,” said Jack, “it’s a woman. Now, are you satisfied?”

“Is it a girl?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

So there was no more to be said. I’d thought it might have been a lot worse than a girl. I’d thought he might have got married somewhere, sometime, and made a mess of it.

We had dinner at Billy Woods’s place, and a sensible Christmas dinner it was–everything cold, except the vegetables, with the hose going on the veranda in spite of the by-laws, and Billy’s wife and her sister, fresh and cool-looking and jolly, instead of being hot and brown and cross like most Australian women who roast themselves over a blazing fire in a hot kitchen on a broiling day, all the morning, to cook scalding plum pudding and redhot roasts, for no other reason than that their grandmothers used to cook hot Christmas dinners in England.

And in the afternoon we went for a row on the river, pulling easily up the anabranch and floating down with the stream under the shade of the river timber–instead of going to sleep and waking up helpless and soaked in perspiration, to find the women with headaches, as many do on Christmas Day in Australia.