There was another family that lived a couple of miles off, higher up the creek, and we had always been good friends with them, though they never came to our house, and only we boys went to theirs. They were the parents of the little girl that went to school with us, and a boy who was a year older than me.
Their father had been a gardener at home, and he married a native girl who was born somewhere about the Hawkesbury, near Windsor. Her father had been a farmer, and many a time she told us how sorry she was to go away from the old place, and what fine corn and pumpkins they grew; and how they had a church at Windsor, and used to take their hay and fruit and potatoes to Sydney, and what a grand place Sydney was, with stone buildings called markets for people to sell fruit and vegetables and poultry in; and how you could walk down into Lower George Street and see Sydney Harbour, a great shining saltwater plain, a thousand times as big as the biggest waterhole, with ships and boats and sailors, and every kind of strange thing upon it.
Mrs. Storefield was pretty fond of talking, and she was always fond of me, because once when she was out after the cows, and her man was away, and she had left Grace at home, the little thing crawled down to the waterhole and tumbled in. I happened to be riding up with a message for mother, to borrow some soap, when I heard a little cry like a lamb’s, and there was poor little Gracey struggling in the water like a drowning kitten, with her face under. Another minute or two would have finished her, but I was off the old pony and into the water like a teal flapper. I had her out in a second or two, and she gasped and cried a bit, but soon came to, and when Mrs. Storefield came home she first cried over her as if she would break her heart, and kissed her, and then she kissed me, and said, “Now, Dick Marston, you look here. Your mother’s a good woman, though simple; your father I don’t like, and I hear many stories about him that makes me think the less we ought to see of the lot of you the better. But you’ve saved my child’s life today, and I’ll be a friend and a mother to you as long as I live, even if you turn out bad, and I’m rather afraid you will—you and Jim both—but it won’t be my fault for want of trying to keep you straight; and John and I will be your kind and loving friends as long as we live, no matter what happens.”
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 nor 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 a 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 gray eyes; “a man must work and save when
