“Come, Ailie,” I said, “are you going to whine and cry all night? I shall be afraid to come home if you’re going to be like this. What’s the message from father?”

She wiped away her tears, and, putting her hand on my shoulder, looked steadily into my face.

“Poor boy—poor, dear Dick,” she said, “I feel as if I should see that fresh face of yours looking very different some day or other. Something tells me that there’s bad luck before you. But never mind, you’ll never lose your sister if the luck’s ever so bad. Father sent word you and Jim were to meet him at Broken Creek and bring your whips with you.”

“What in the world’s that for?” I said, half speaking to myself. “It looks as if there was a big mob to drive, and where’s he to get a big mob there in that mountainous, beastly place, where the cattle all bolt like wallabies, and where I never saw twenty head together?”

“He’s got some reason for it,” said Aileen sorrowfully. “If I were you I wouldn’t go. It’s no good, and father’s trying now to drag you and Jim into the bad ways he’s been following these years.”

“How do you know it’s so bad?” said I. “How can a girl like you know?”

“I know very well,” she said. “Do you think I’ve lived here all these years and don’t know things? What makes him always come home after dark, and be that nervous every time he sees a stranger coming up you’d think he was come out of gaol? Why has he always got money, and why does mother look so miserable when he’s at home, and cheer up when he goes away?”

“He may get jobs of droving or something,” I said. “You have no right to say that he’s robbing, or something of that sort, because he doesn’t care about tying himself to mother’s apron-string.” Aileen laughed, but it was more like crying.

“You told me just now,” she said—oh! so sorrowfully—“that you and Jim were old enough to take a line of your own. Why don’t you do it now?”

“And tell father we’ll have nothing more to do with him!”

“Why not?” she said, standing up straight before me, and facing me just as I saw father face the big bullock-driver before he knocked him down. “Why not? You need never ask him for another meal; you can earn an easy living in half-a-dozen ways, you and Jim. Why should you let him spoil your life and ruin your soul for evermore?”

“The priest put that into your head,” I said sneeringly; “Father Doyle—of course he knows what they’ll do with a fellow after he’s dead.”

“No!” she said, “Father Doyle never said a word about you that wasn’t good and kind. He says mother’s a good Catholic, and he takes an interest in you boys and me because of her.”

“He can persuade you women to do anything,” I said, not that I had any grudge against poor old Father Doyle, who used to come riding up the rough mountain track on his white horse, and tiring his old bones, just “to look after his flock,” as he said—and nice lambs some of them were—but I wanted to tease her and make her break off with this fancy of hers.