The Coming of the Heiress

One glorious spring morning, Hugh Gordon was sitting in his
office--every squatter and station-manager has an office--waiting
with considerable impatience the coming of the weekly mail. The
office looked like a blend of stationer's shop, tobacconist's store,
and saddlery warehouse. A row of pigeon-holes along the walls was
filled with letters and papers; the rafters were hung with saddles
and harness; a tobacco-cutter and a jar of tobacco stood on the
table, side by side with some formidable-looking knives, used for
cutting the sheep's feet when they became diseased; whips and guns
stood in every corner; nails and saws filled up a lot of boxes
on the table, and a few samples of wool hung from a rope that was
stretched across the room. The mantelpiece was occupied by bottles of
horse-medicine and boxes of cartridges; an elderly white cockatoo,
chained by the leg to a galvanised iron perch, sunned himself
by the door, and at intervals gave an exhibition of his latest
accomplishment, in which he imitated the yowl of a trodden-on cat
much better than the cat could have done it himself.

The air was heavy with scent. All round the great quadrangle of the
house acacia trees were in bloom, and the bees were working busily
among the mignonette and roses in front of the office door.

Hugh Gordon was a lithe, wiry young Australian with intensely
sunburnt face and hands, and a drooping black moustache; a man with
a healthy, breezy outdoor appearance, but the face of an artist,
a dreamer, and a thinker, rather than that of a practical man. His
brother Charlie and he, though very much alike in face, were quite
different types of manhood. Charlie, from his earliest school-days,
had never read a book except under compulsion, had never stayed
indoors when he could possibly get out, had never obeyed an unwelcome
order when by force or fraud he could avoid doing so, and had never
written a letter in his life when a telegram would do. He took the
world as it came, having no particular amount of imagination, and
never worried himself. Hugh, on the other hand, was inclined to
meet trouble half-way, and to make troubles where none existed,
which is the worst misfortune that a man can be afflicted with.