Page:The Toll of the Bush.pdf/19

through him for four or five hundred, and that there was close on three hundred owing in the settlement alone. Said he’d put the wire in at a trifle over cost if we could manage to pay cash. He’s not a bad sort, Geoffrey.’

Geoffrey was silent awhile. Then he said, ‘I ought to have gone myself. You can’t get credit without lying, and you’re a poor hand at it, Robert.’

‘I just said what you told me,’ replied Robert slowly. ‘Only when he came to talk back it looked different somehow, and—I’m not clever like you, Geoff.’

The words were simply spoken, and free from intent, but the elder brother laughed as though he saw something suggestive about them.

‘We’ll just have to go on blasting out rails,’ he said presently. ‘My God! how sick I am of the whole business. Is there any hope for the wretched country at all? Look at it!’ he continued with a sudden angry scorn,—‘ clay and scrub and precipices, with here and there an acre of orchard, and all the plagues of Egypt domiciled in it. What’s the good of going on?’

‘I was looking at Thomas’s place,’ said Robert ponderingly, ‘when I was up there with the cricket team last Christmas. It must have looked like this twenty years ago. It’s green enough now.’

‘And you can look forward twenty years? Yet after all, why not? It’s better than looking back. They have electric railways in England now, but when Queen Elizabeth lived they were probably content with roads no better than this.’

‘Is she dead?’ asked Robert, relieved at the sudden change of subject.