After that—it was strange enough—but I always took to the little toddling thing that I’d pulled out of the water. I wasn’t very big myself, if it comes to that, and she seemed to have a feeling about it, for she’d come to me every time I went there, and sit on my knee and look at me with her big brown serious eyes—they were just the same after she grew up—and talk to me in her little childish lingo. I believe she knew all about it, for she used to say, “Dick pull Gracey out of water”; and then she’d throw her arms round my neck and kiss me, and walk off to her mother. If I’d let her drown then, and tied a stone round my neck and dropped through the reeds to the bottom of the big waterhole, it would have been better for both of us.

When John came home he was nearly as bad as the old woman, and wanted to give me a filly, but I wouldn’t have it, boy as I was. I never cared for money or money’s worth, and I was not going to be paid for picking a kid out of the water.

George Storefield, Gracey’s brother, was about my own age. He thought a lot of what I’d done for her, and years afterwards I threatened to punch his head if he said anything more about it. He laughed, and held out his hand.

“You and I might have been better friends lately,” says he; “but don’t you forget you’ve got another brother besides Jim—one that will stick to you, too. fair weather or foul.”

I always had a great belief in George, though we didn’t get on over well, and often had fallings out. He was too steady and hardworking altogether for Jim and me. He worked all day and every day, and saved every penny he made. Catch him gaffing!—no, not for sixpence. He called the Dalys and Jacksons thieves and swindlers who would be locked up, or even hanged, some day, unless they mended themselves. As for drinking a glass of grog, you might just as soon ask him to take a little laudanum or arsenic.

“Why should I drink grog,” he used to say—“such stuff, too, as you get at that old villain Grimes’s—with a good appetite and a good conscience? I’m afraid of no man; the police may come and live on my ground for what I care. I work all day, have a read in the evening, and sleep like a top when I turn in. What do I want more?”

“Oh, but you never see any life,” Jim said; “you’re just like an old working bullock that walks up to the yoke in the morning and never stops hauling till he’s let go at night. This is a free country, and I don’t think a fellow was born for that kind of thing and nothing else.”

“This country’s like any other country, Jim,” George would say, holding up his head, and looking straight at him with his steady grey eyes; “a man must work and save when he’s young if he don’t want to be a beggar or a slave when he’s old. I believe in a man enjoying himself as well as you do, but my notion of that is to have a good farm, well stocked and paid for, by and by, and then to take it easy, perhaps when my back is a little stiffer than it is now.”