The station hands, his work-mates--if he had any--had had a slightly contemptuous feeling for him. They liked him--they were always saying they liked him--but it was clear they never had any great opinion of him. As a boy, when he began to work with them, to cover his shyness and nervousness, he had been silent and boorish; and he had never had the courage of his opinions--courage for anything, it was suspected. It had always been hinted that he shirked any jobs where danger was to be expected.
The stockmen told each other they would miss him, all the same. They would miss that wonderful whistling of his from the camp fires; and they were appalled at what he had done to himself. "The last man," Charley Este said, "the last man you'd ever 've thought would 've come to that!" Most of them believed they had misjudged Arthur Henty--that, after, all, he had had courage of a sort. A man must have courage to blow out his light, they said. And they were sorry. Every man in the crowd was heavy with sorrow.
Ridge people gossiped pitifully, sentimentally, to each other as they drove home. Most of the women believed in the strength and fidelity of the old love between Sophie and Arthur Henty. But straight-dealing and honest themselves, they had no conception of the tricks complex personalities play each other; they did not understand how two people who had really cared for each other could have gone so astray from the natural impulse of their lives.
They recalled the dance at Warria, and how they had teased Sophie when they thought she was going to marry Arthur Henty, and how happy and pleased she had looked about it. How different both their lives would have been if Sophie and Arthur had been true to that instinct of the mate for the mate, they reflected; and sighed at the futility of the thought. They realised in Arthur Henty's drinking and rough ways of late, all his unhappiness. They imagined that they knew why he had become the uncouth-looking man he had. They remembered him a slight, shy youth, with sun-bright, freckled eyes; then a man, lithe, graceful, and good to look at, with his face a clear, fine bronze, his hair taking a glint of copper in the sun. When he danced with them at the Ridge balls, that occasionally flashing, delightful way of his had made them realise why Sophie was in love with him. They remembered how he had looked at Sophie; how his eyes had followed her. They had heard of the Warria dance, and knew Arthur Henty had not behaved well to Sophie at it. They had been angry at the time. Then Sophie had gone away ... and a little later he had married.