Page 9 - A Little Bush Maid

character. He was fond and proud of Jim--glad that the boy was growing up
straight and strong and manly, able to make his way in the world. But

Norah was his heart’s desire.

Of course she was spoilt—if spoiling consists in rarely checking an impulse.
All her life Norah had done pretty well whatever she wanted--which meant
that she had lived out of doors, followed in Jim’s footsteps wherever

practicable (and in a good many ways most people would have thought
distinctly impracticable), and spent about two-thirds of her waking time on

horseback. But the spoiling was not of a very harmful kind. Her chosen
pursuits brought her under the unspoken discipline of the work of the
station, wherein ordinary instinct taught her to do as others did, and

conform to their ways. She had all the dread of being thought "silly" that
marks the girl who imitates boyish ways. Jim’s rare growl, "Have a little

sense!" went farther home than a whole volume of admonitions of a more
ordinarily genuine feminine type.

She had no little girl friends, for none was nearer than the nearest
township--Cunjee, seventeen miles away. Moreover, little girls bored

Norah frightfully. They seemed a species quite distinct from herself. They
prattled of dolls; they loved to skip, to dress up and "play ladies"; and when
Norah spoke of the superior joys of cutting out cattle or coursing hares over

the Long Plain, they stared at her with blank lack of understanding. With
boys she got on much better. Jim and she were tremendous chums, and she

had moped sadly when he went to Melbourne to school. Holidays then
became the shining events of the year, and the boys whom Jim brought
home with him, at first prone to look down on the small girl with lofty

condescension, generally ended by voting her "no end of a jolly kid," and
according her the respect due to a person who could teach them more of

bush life than they had dreamed of.

But Norah’s principal mate was her father. Day after day they were

together, riding over the run, working the cattle, walking through the thick
scrub of the backwater, driving young, half-broken horses in the high

dog-cart to Cunjee--they were rarely apart. David Linton seldom made a
plan that did not naturally include Norah. She was a wise little companion,