and drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the
paint wrong side out. I was slapping it on over the last few boards
when:

"I'm very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin' yer;
but there's that there woman and them girls---"

I looked down--about the first time I had looked down on him--and
there was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two
half-crowns in it.

"Oh, that's all right, Bob," I said, and I dropped in half a crown.

There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some
barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were
strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word,
who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had
taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town.
There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their
establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and
turned out by their landlord.

"This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe," said one of the shearers.
"Them ---s has made enough out of us coves. They've got plenty of
stuff, don't you fret. Let 'em go to ---! I'm blanked if I give a
sprat."

"They ain't got their fares to Sydney," said the Giraffe. "An',
what's more, the little 'un is sick, an' two of them has kids in
Sydney."