from the pub.

Perhaps she found a way of giving a hint to old Black
without committing herself. Women have ways -- or perhaps Jack did it.
Anyway, next day the Boss came round and said to me --

`Look here, Joe, you've got no occasion to stay at the pub.
Bring along your blankets and camp in one of the spare rooms of the old house.
You can have your tucker here.'

He was a good sort, was Black the squatter: a squatter of the old school,
who'd shared the early hardships with his men, and couldn't see
why he should not shake hands and have a smoke and a yarn over old times
with any of his old station hands that happened to come along.
But he'd married an Englishwoman after the hardships were over,
and she'd never got any Australian notions.

Next day I found one of the skillion rooms scrubbed out and a bed fixed up
for me. I'm not sure to this day who did it, but I supposed
that good-natured old Black had given one of the women a hint.
After tea I had a yarn with Mary, sitting on a log of the wood-heap.
I don't remember exactly how we both came to be there, or who sat down first.
There was about two feet between us. We got very chummy and confidential.
She told me about her childhood and her father.

He'd been an old mate of Black's, a younger son of a well-to-do English family
(with blue blood in it, I believe), and sent out to Australia
with a thousand pounds to make his way, as many younger sons are,
with more or less. They think they're hard done by;
they blue their thousand pounds in Melbourne or Sydney,