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I attended my relative’s funeral, and next day started back for Sydney.

Just as we reached Ilford, as it happened, the pin of the fore under-carriage of the coach broke, and it took the blacksmith several hours to set it right. The place was dull, the publican was not communicative–or else he harped on the old local grievance of the railway not having come that way–so about half an hour before I thought the coach would be ready, I walked on along the road to stretch by legs. I walked on and on until I came, almost unaware, to the site of the house that was never built. The tent was still there, in fact, it was a permanent camp, and I was rather surprised to see the man working with a trowel on a corner of the unfinished foundations of the house. At first I thought he was going to build a stone hut in the corner, but when I got close to him I saw that he was working carefully on the original plan of the building: he was building the unfinished parts of the foundation walls up to the required height. He had bricklayer’s tools, a bag of lime, and a heap of sand, and had worked up a considerable quantity of mortar. It was a rubble foundation: he was knocking off the thin end of a piece of stone to make it fit, and the clanging of the trowel prevented his hearing my footsteps.

“Good day, mate,” I said, close beside him.

I half expected he’d start when I spoke, but he didn’t: he looked round slowly, but with a haunted look in his eyes as if I might have been one of his ghosts. He was a tall man, gaunt and haggard-eyed, as many men are in the bush; he may have been but little past middle age, and grey before his time.

“Good day,” he said, and he set the stone in its place, carefully flush with the outer edge of the wall, before he spoke again. Then he looked at the sun, which was low, laid down his trowel, and asked me to come to the tent-fire. “It’s turning chilly,” he said. It was a model camp, everything clean and neat both inside the tent and out; he had made a stone fireplace with a bark shelter over it, and a table and bench under another little shed, with shelves for his tin cups and plates and cooking utensils. He put a box in front of the fire and folded a flour-bag on top of it for a seat for me, and hung the billy over the fire. He sat on his heels and poked the burning sticks, abstractedly I thought, or to keep his hands and thoughts steady.

“I see you’re doing a bit of building,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes on the fire; “I’m getting on with it slowly.”

I don’t suppose he looked at me half a dozen times the whole while I was in his camp. When he spoke he talked just as if he were sitting yarning in a row of half a dozen of us. Presently he said suddenly, and giving the fire a vicious dig with his poker:

“That house must be finished by Christmas.”

“Why?” I asked, taken by surprise. “What’s the hurry?”

“Because,” he said, “I’m going to be married in the New Year–to the best and dearest girl in the bush.”

There was an awkward pause on my part, but presently I pulled myself together.

“You’ll never finish it by yourself,” I said. “Why don’t you put on some men?”

“Because,” he said, “I can’t trust them. Besides, how am I to get bricklayers and carpenters in a place like this?”

I noticed all through that his madness or the past in his mind was mixed up with the real and the present.