The Far Country Read Online Free PDF

trouble they won’t have it again. I said I’d get the tickets for them. Where would I do that?”
    “Mrs. Hayward, up by Marshall’s. She’s selling them. I’ll get them for you if you like to give me the money, Mr. Dorman, and send them out with the mail.”
    He handed her a note from his wallet. “Thanks. Anything more happened about you going home?”
    She nodded, with eyes shining. “I’ve got a passage booked on the
Orontes
, fifth of May. It’s terribly exciting, I just can’t wait. Dad did well out of the wool this year.”
    “Fine,” he said. “What part of England are you going to?”
    “Ma’s people all live in a place called Nottingham,” she said. “That’s in the middle somewhere, I think. I’m going to stay with them at first, but after that I want to get a job in London.”
    “London’s all right,” he said. “I was in England with the first A.I.F. and I don’t suppose it’s altered very much. From what I hear they don’t get much to eat these days. We’ll have to send you food parcels.”
    She laughed. “That’s what Ma says. But I think it’s all right. People who’ve been there say there’s a lot of nonsense talked about food being short. It’s not as bad as they make out.”
    “I never heard of anyone send back a food parcel, all the same,” he observed.
    “I don’t think they’ve got as much as all that,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean, they do like to get parcels still. I’m going to take a lot of tins with me.” She paused. “It’s going to be a beaut trip,” she said thoughtfully. “I just can’t wait till May.”
    Jack Dorman went out of the post office and got into the car, and went to see the builder. He stayed with him some time talking about the three-roomed house for Mario, and arranged for him to come and measure up for the timber and weatherboarding required. This all took a little time, and by the time he got back to the dressmaker to pick up Jane she was ready for him. They did a little more shopping together, put the parcels on the ledge behind the driving seat, and drove out on the road to Buttercup.
    George and Ann Pearson lived on rather a smaller property of about fifteen hundred acres; they had no river and they got the water for their stock from dams bulldozed or scooped out to form catchment pools at strategic points upon the land. They were younger than the Dormans, and they still had a young family. The youngest child was Judith, only eight years old, but old enough to catch and saddle her own pony every morning and ride six miles to school with her satchel on her back. Because this was the normal way of going to school the schoolhouse was provided with a paddock; the children rode in and unsaddled, hung their saddles and bridles on the fence, and went in to their lessons. After school they caught their ponies, the schoolmistress helping them if there were any difficulty, saddled up, and rode six miles home again.
    George Pearson had rigged up a diving-board and a pair of steps to turn his largest dam into a swimming-pool, and the children were bathing in it as the Dormans drove by. They had evidently brought friends on their way back from school, because three ponies grazed beside the dam with saddles on their backs. Weeping willows seventy feet high grew around the pool, and half a dozen little bodies flashed and splashed with shrill cries from the diving-board in the bright sun.
    “I’d have thought it was too cold for bathing still,” Jane observed. “It’s only October.”
    “It’s warm in the sun,” Jack said. “It was up to eighty, dinnertime.”
    “It’s cold in the water, though,” she replied. “George told me that it’s twelve feet deep, that dam. It’ll be cold just down below the surface.”
    “They don’t mind,” he said. He took his eyes from the track and looked again at the dam. “I often wish we’d had a dam,” he said. “Those kids, they get a lot of fun out of that.”
    They drove on to the