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Well. It was the first morning on the creek: I was greasing the waggon-wheels, and James out after the horse, and Mary hanging out clothes, in an old print dress and a big ugly white hood, when I heard her being hailed as ‘Hi, missus!’ from the front slip-rails.

It was a boy on horseback. He was a light-haired, very much freckled boy of fourteen or fifteen, with a small head, but with limbs, especially his bare sun-blotched shanks, that might have belonged to a grown man. He had a good face and frank grey eyes. An old, nearly black cabbage-tree hat rested on the butts of his ears, turning them out at right angles from his head, and rather dirty sprouts they were. He wore a dirty torn Crimean shirt; and a pair of man’s moleskin trousers rolled up above the knees, with the wide waistband gathered under a greenhide belt. I noticed, later on, that, even when he wore trousers short enough for him, he always rolled ’em up above the knees when on horseback, for some reason of his own: to suggest leggings, perhaps, for he had them rolled up in all weathers, and he wouldn’t have bothered to save them from the sweat of the horse, even if that horse ever sweated.

He was seated astride a three-bushel bag thrown across the ridge-pole of a big grey horse, with a coffin-shaped head, and built astern something after the style of a roughly put up hip-roofed box-bark humpy.* His colour was like old box-bark, too, a dirty bluish-grey; and, one time, when I saw his rump looming out of the scrub, I really thought it was some old shepherd’s hut that I hadn’t noticed there before. When he cantered it was like the humpy starting off on its corner-posts.

* ‘Humpy’, a rough hut.

‘Are you Mrs Wilson?’ asked the boy.

‘Yes,’ said Mary.

‘Well, mother told me to ride acrost and see if you wanted anythink. We killed lars’ night, and I’ve fetched a piece er cow.’

‘Piece of WHAT?’ asked Mary.

He grinned, and handed a sugar-bag across the rail with something heavy in the bottom of it, that nearly jerked Mary’s arm out when she took it. It was a piece of beef, that looked as if it had been cut off with a wood-axe, but it was fresh and clean.

‘Oh, I’m so glad!’ cried Mary. She was always impulsive, save to me sometimes. ‘I was just wondering where we were going to get any fresh meat. How kind of your mother! Tell her I’m very much obliged to her indeed.’ And she felt behind her for a poor little purse she had. ‘And now–how much did your mother say it would be?’

The boy blinked at her, and scratched his head.

‘How much will it be,’ he repeated, puzzled. ‘Oh–how much does it weigh I-s’pose-yer-mean. Well, it ain’t been weighed at all–we ain’t got no scales. A butcher does all that sort of think. We just kills it, and cooks it, and eats it–and goes by guess. What won’t keep we salts down in the cask. I reckon it weighs about a ton by the weight of it if yer wanter know. Mother thought that if she sent any more it would go bad before you could scoff it. I can’t see—-‘

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mary, getting confused. ‘But what I want to know is, how do you manage when you sell it?’

He glared at her, and scratched his head. ‘Sell it? Why, we only goes halves in a steer with some one, or sells steers to the butcher–or maybe some meat to a party of fencers or surveyors, or tank-sinkers, or them sorter people—-‘

‘Yes, yes; but what I want to know is, how much am I to send your mother for this?’

‘How much what?’

‘Money, of course, you stupid boy,’ said Mary. ‘You seem a very stupid boy.’

Then he saw what she was driving at. He began to fling his heels convulsively against the sides of his horse, jerking his body backward and forward at the same time, as if to wind up and start some clockwork machinery inside the horse, that made it go, and seemed to need repairing or oiling.