When at length the journey was over, and the proprietor of Rainbar and Mildool was deposited, with his portmanteau, at the garden gate of the former station, Mr. Neuchamp was constrained to confess that he hardly knew his own place. There had been much growth and greenery when he left with the fat cattle; but the riotous extravagance of nature in that direction could not have been credited by him without actual eye-witness.
Around the buildings, the garden fence, the stockyard, the cowshed, was a growth of giant herbage, composed of wild oats, wild barley, marsh-mallows, clover, and fodder plants unnamed, that almost smothered these humble buildings and enclosures. A few milch cows fed lazily, looking as if they had been employed in testing the comparative merits of oilcake and Thorley’s cattle-food, for an agricultural experiment. The river-flats below the house were knee-deep in clover and meadow grasses, causing Mr. Neuchamp to wonder whether or no it would be worth while to go in for a mowing-machine and a few horse-rakes, for the easy conversion of a fraction of it into a few hundred tons of meadow hay, to be stored against the next, ‘dry year.’ The mixed grasses, as he had tested in a small way, made excellent hay. But how far off looked such a calamity! Thus ever with ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm’ do we lightly measure the future, recking neither of stormy sky nor of the ravening deep.
After Mr. Neuchamp had sufficiently admired the grassy wilderness, thoughts arose respecting dinner, and also a feeling of wonder where everybody was. The station appeared to be minding itself. The cook was absent, though recent indications of his presence were visible in the kitchen. Charley Banks was away and Jack Windsor, probably at Mildool; also Piambook, whose open countenance and dazzling teeth would have been better than nothing. Where was Mrs. Windsor, _née_ Walton? He had rather looked forward to having a talk with her under new conditions of life. She could not be at Mildool, as there was no shelter for a decent woman there. What in the name of wonder had become of them all? There were no Indians in this country, or he might have turned his thoughts in the direction of Blackfeet or Comanches, the ‘wolf Apaché and the cannibal Navajo.’ Not even a Mormon settlement handy enough to organise a ‘mountain-meadows massacre’! He never thought Rainbar so lonely before. He went into the cottage, and in a leisurely way unpacked his portmanteau in the snug bedroom which he had so long inhabited—where he had so often, before the rain came, lain down in sorrow and arisen in despair. What a tiny wooden box it seemed! Yet he had thought it comfortable, even luxurious. Like those of many other distinguished travellers and heroes long absent from the scene of early conflict or youthful habitation, the eyes of Mr. Neuchamp had altered their focus.