Читать книгу The Record of Nicholas Freydon - A. J. Dawson - Страница 16

As the morning wore on, however, and we left behind us all likelihood of chance encounters with more fortunately placed and therefore critical people, bestriding pigskin, Ted's spirits rose again to their normal easy altitude, and mounted beyond that to the level of boyish jollity. Myself, I incline to think that walking along a bush track, with a long stick in his hand and a pack-horse to drive before him, was really an ideal situation for Ted, despite his preference for riding. Afoot, he could so readily step aside to start a 'goanner' up a tree, or pluck an out-of-the-way growth to show me.

There never was such a fellow for 'noticing' things, as they say of children. Print he never read, so far as I know, and perhaps this helped to make him so amazingly keen a reader of Nature. Not the littlest comma on that page ever eluded him.

'Hullo!' he would say when Werrina was miles away behind us. 'Who'd've thought o' that baldy-faced steer o' Murdoch's bein' out here?' One gazed about to locate the beast. But, no. No living thing was in sight. In passing, quite casually, Ted's roving eye had spied a hoof mark, perhaps a day old or more, in the soft bottom of a tiny billabong; a print I could hardly make out, leave alone identify as having been made by this beast or the other, even under the guidance of Ted's pointing finger. Yet for Ted that casual glance--no stooping, no close scrutiny--supplied an accurate and complete picture: the particular beast, its gait, occupation, and way of heading, and the period at which it had passed that way. Withal, it was true enough, as the storekeeper said, poor Ted had no 'Systum'; or none, at all events, of the kind cultivated in shops and offices.