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I USED to be frightfully keen on having adventures—when I’d never had any. But my first really big one ended up with a smashed head and a broken leg; and for a good time after that I felt that adventures weren’t all they were cracked up to be. They are exciting while they are happening, but you can pay a bit too much for them. My payments went on for a long while, and before they were finished I had made up my mind that never again would I go in for anything but a quiet life, with nothing more exciting than just riding after cattle in the holidays. Which only goes to show that one should never make up one’s mind about anything, because things happen just the same.

My smash-up came just at the end of the Christmas holidays, so I missed a whole term at school. I could stand being without lessons quite easily; but I might have been captain of the Second Eleven that term, with any luck. To know you have missed a thing like that doesn’t make lying in bed any pleasanter. Still ... grousing, even inside one’s mind, only helps you to feel worse, so I tried to forget it by thinking a lot about football and winter games, because I never doubted I would be all right in the winter term.

All my people were jolly good over helping me to forget things that bothered me. I used to feel I was nearly helping to run our place with Dad, he told me so much about the cattle and all the station affairs; just as if I was grown-up. Mother was simply full of dodges for keeping me from getting broody, and so were my sister Binkie and Miss Tarrant, who is her governess, but not at all like one. Miss Tarrant actually worked me up to writing a book about my adventures,^[1] and now I believe I have got the book habit, because here I’m at it again. But it is rather fun to write down things that happen to you, and anyhow, nobody except Binkie and me will ever see my books. Oh, and Clem, of course.

[1]	Told by Peter (Mary Grant Bruce).

Clem Hardy is English, but he and his father have lived near Weeroona—that’s our place—for years. Their house is shut up now, though, because Mr. Hardy had to have an operation, and the doctors are keeping him in a sort of rest-home in the hills until he is quite strong again. So of course Mother and Dad made Clem come to live with us. That suited me down to the ground, for I haven’t any friend as good as Clem. It was good for Clem, too; he’d had a lot of worry and responsibility, too much for any boy, what with his father’s illness and being very poor. And on top of all that, he had been through all my adventures, and it was rather a miracle he hadn’t been killed. We don’t much like thinking about that time now, and we’ve made up our minds not to talk about it.

Everyone reckoned Clem and I would be fit as fiddles by the time the next holidays were over, and quite ready to go off together to school in Sydney. But things didn’t pan out so well as that. My old leg was still giving me trouble; nothing very bad, but it was a bit stiff, and it ached like fury sometimes. The doctor said I’d better go, if only because I could get massage in Sydney; but he put his foot down on the idea of my playing games, which to my mind made it quite silly to go to school at all. And poor old Clem was even worse. He has never been frightfully strong, and all he had gone through had told on him. He took to sleeping badly and hardly eating enough for a self-respecting tom-tit. Mother was pretty worried about him. So at last she and Dad decided that he had better stay at Weeroona that term, having a quiet open-air life and doing a few lessons with Miss Tarrant, who is really frightfully brainy in spite of making a joke of most things, including us.

Well, that didn’t make it any jollier for me to go back to school like a lame duck, and I went off with a dismal feeling that the bottom had fallen out of everything. School was even worse than I’d expected. At ordinary times I endure lessons as best I can, knowing that games are ahead, and anyone who feels as I do can imagine what it meant to know I couldn’t do anything worth doing, like football or gym, or running. I could only limp round and watch other people. And if you have always gone in for games, and then all of a sudden you can’t, you’re awfully lonely. All your pals are hard at it, and no matter how decent they are they can’t come and just flop about on a seat, as I had to do. I guessed that lots of them went out of their way to be extra decent to me, but it didn’t seem to help much. I know I was like a bear with a sore head when anyone sympathized with me, and I simply couldn’t stick it when people were patient with me—and even polite. I’d know quite well they would have liked to let me have all that was coming to me for being a bear, and I’d wish they would let themselves go. But of course nobody would, just because I was a crock.

And I was scared about my leg. That was the worst part—to feel that I’d lost my nerve and didn’t dare take chances with it. I kept thinking, what if it’s always going to be like this, or even get worse; and I’d wonder if there was something about it that the doctor and my people at home hadn’t told me. I wondered that so hard that I’d dream about it at night and wake up sweating. Anyone who knew Dad and Mother could have told me I was a young idiot, of course. I suppose it was just that I’d had a pretty tough time and wasn’t really fit in other ways.

Twice a week I went to a masseur, and gosh, how I loathed that man! He was long and thin and greasy-looking, and he had a voice to match. He called me “little man,” and he talked to me as if I was six years old, never guessing how greatly I longed to punch his silly head. He asked fool questions about the people at school—“your playmates” he called them. All the time he was pommelling and kneading my leg he talked, until I hated the sound of his oily voice; just as I hated the very way he touched me. I never felt he was going to do me a bit of good; and he didn’t, either.

Well, at the end of a month I wasn’t fit to speak to, and I knew it. Of course I never let on what I was feeling in my letters home. Mother had had quite enough worry about me as it was. I tried to keep anything I wrote merry and bright, but I couldn’t make the letters very long. A good many of them I tore up and had to start again. That didn’t matter; goodness knows I had plenty of time those days to write letters.

There’s a corner in the garden of our House where the afternoon sun comes even in winter, with bushes round it that make a good wind-break. Sometimes when I was fed up with seeing games being played by people with two good legs I used to go there and lie on a rug on the grass with a book. I must have read every thriller in the House library in that corner, but I don’t remember a bit of any of them. Well, one afternoon I was there. A letter from Binkie had come by that morning’s post. I took it out and read it again. Binkie is not much on spelling, but she generally tells me the sort of things I want to hear. There’s always something about my red setter Bran, and about Roona, my black mare; she’s the only person who rides Roona when I’m not able to.

Dear Peter,

We are all well and I hope you are in the pink, or getting there. We liked awfully the picture you drew of the man massadging you. He looks a bit of a blot, I think, but I suppose he knows his job. Does it hurt?

Things are going on here just the same as ushual. Clem and Tarry and I helped Dad to shift the new lot of bullocks off the flats yesterday because the river is nearly running a banker and if we get any more rain there will probibly be a flud. I rode Roona, and she was as fresh as paint and full of beans. She did nothing but pig-root for the first five minutes after I got on her, but she setled down when we got near the cattle. Tarry rode Brenda and she went over her head beautifully when she, I mean Brenda, put her foot in a rabbit-hole, and came down on her nose. There was no dammige done, only to Tarry’s temper, and of course we haven’t finished ragging her about it yet. You could draw the picture of it for Tarry if you liked I am sure she would pryze it.

Clem is looking rarther better and he eats a bit more. I think he does not have so many bad dreams, but we do not ask him. He is anoyed because Tarry made a stern rule that when we three go out together we are only to talk French which cramps his stile a good deal. So she altered the rule to be that we can talk english after we turn homewards, and we now notis that Clem sugests going home much sooner than he used to, only then he goes by a much more roundabout way. So the way home is much longer than the way out. Tarry says this is called strattijy. One day he surprised us very much by yelling out quite fluently “C’est un sapin!” and going off at a gallop, though we could not see why he wanted to chase a pine-tree, and no pine-tree was visable. But it turned out that he had only meant lapin, which is a rabbit. He did not deseave the dogs and they caught the rabbit all right.

I am writing with my feet on Bran, who lies under the schoolroom table any time he can. He sends you a lick, and so do all the rest of us, yours,

Binkie.

.....

I read that letter through twice, and it made me see Weeroona again, and all the jolly times we used to have; and that I couldn’t have now. I wondered if I’d have nerve enough to ride Roona again on one of those days when she was so full of spirit she just had to pig-root. It was no good thinking of that, so I started reading. Somehow the book seemed duller than usual. In fact, I had chucked reading it altogether, and I was lying face downwards, just thinking, when I heard a step near me. At first I kept still, thinking it was one of the other fellows; and I didn’t want to talk to anybody. Then a voice I knew said, “Hullo, young Forsyth!”—and I twisted round in a hurry.

It was Mr. Garfield, and he is a man we have liked awfully ever since we first met him, which was when he crashed in a ’plane in a paddock beside Binkie and Clem and me and killed two cows. (They were old scrags of cows anyhow, and better dead.) He had been mixed up in our adventures, and all the time I was ill he was terribly good to me, often flying down to Weeroona just to see me: and even when my leg was at its worst he could always make me laugh. He had had to go on a trip to Central Australia just before I came back to school, and I had missed him awfully. It was great to see him again. I was so astonished I could only sit on my rug and stare at him for a minute. He looked at me pretty hard, too.

“Don’t get up—can I have a corner of rug?” he said. So he sat down and asked how my leg was, and then he seemed to forget all about it. I forgot it myself, yarning to him. He told me all about his trip, which had been pretty exciting in spots, between his car getting bogged in sandhills, and trouble with camels, and a spot of bother with rather hostile blacks: and then we yarned about the family at Weeroona and Clem and Mr. Hardy; he had questions to ask about every person he’d met in our district. It was a ripping talk, one that I’d been sort of aching for. It wasn’t until near the end of his visit that he got back to the subject of my leg and how much I was able to do with it. I told him about my hated masseur, and I believe I let myself go a bit. For the first time he looked grave.

“I don’t believe he’ll do you much good if you feel that way about him,” he said. “Massage is a queer thing; it means a lot if you feel in sympathy with the chap who’s pounding you. When do you go to him again?”

I said, “Thursday, worse luck; and I wouldn’t feel in sympathy with him if I went to him for a hundred years. He’s just a long, greasy worm. You wouldn’t like him a bit better than I do, Mr. Garfield.”

“Well, do your best to stand him on Thursday,” he said. “Because I want you on Saturday. Remember we made a date once that we’d paint Sydney red one day when you went back to school?”

I hadn’t forgotten that date. We’d made it the first day I ever met him, when he was still a bit groggy from having crashed his ’plane, and I ... well, I had two good legs then. I’d often thought of how we’d keep it, if he hadn’t forgotten all about it. Only, I was so different now; I couldn’t see how he’d want to go about with a crock. And the thought of how different I was just beat me, and I couldn’t bear it. I twisted round again with my face in my arms because I didn’t want him to look at me.

He didn’t say anything for a bit. I expect he was giving me time to get hold of myself. But he is the kind of person who doesn’t need to say anything: you just feel understandingness in his silence. Somehow, I didn’t feel ashamed, even though I’d acted like a kid. I felt he knew I was scared blue about my leg, and I didn’t care. And presently he spoke just as if he was talking to himself.

He said, “It’s fairly easy to stand being crocked when one is a cot-case. In hospital, or at home among one’s people, with everyone doing things to help. Not so easy when one’s the only crock among a few hundred active youngsters. It’s the contrast that hurts. Makes one feel it’s going to last for ever. But it doesn’t, you know, Peter. Been through it myself, after the War: I reckoned I’d never be sound again, and I went pretty deep down. And it was all unnecessary torment, though it was real enough while it lasted. I was too tough to stay a crock. And so are you, Peter: a darned sight too tough.”

“I thought I was ... once,” I said, sort of choking.

“You can keep on thinking it,” he said. “Think it all the time, and never let your thought waver. It helps patience to grow. And there mightn’t be the need for so much patience, at that. I have ideas buzzing in my head, and they will continue to buzz until I meet you on Saturday. Then we’ll buzz round together. If it’s fine we’ll take the speed-boat out, and if it isn’t—well, we’ll do something else. Ten o’clock too early for you?”

“Not much!” I said—and I found I could turn round and look at him, for the very idea of a speed-boat seemed to make me better. “Where?”

“I’ll be here at ten with the car. It’s all right about leave—I saw the Head and fixed it up with him before I came round here. He’s an old friend of mine. Come along to the gate with me. You were on crutches last time we met; I want to see how you get along under your own steam.”

So I went to the gate with him, trying hard not to limp much; and he watched me just as if he was looking at a horse’s action, not just sympathizing.

“Pretty good effort, I think—considering what a smash it was,” he said. “Keep the confidence going, old chap, and try to restrain yourself from damaging that masseur of yours on Thursday—the poor fellow may not have you much longer. Ten sharp on Saturday—cheerio!”

I went back to the House feeling as if a sea-breeze had come along suddenly and blown away the black clouds that had been settling round me. There was a sort of excitement instead, and a new hope. I’d have been more excited still if I’d known that Mr. Garfield got his ’plane out that very evening and flew down to Weeroona.