Read The Far Country for Free Online

not know what the world was coming to, if I’d to eat a thing like that….”
    Everything foreign in the newspapers was puzzling to them, these days. The murders and the pictures of the bathing girls were solid, homely matters that they could understand, but the implacable hostility of the Russians was an enigma. Fortunately they were seven or eight thousand miles away, and so it didn’t matter very much. Korea and the Chinese provided another puzzle; Australian boys were fighting there for no very clear reason except that a meeting of the United Nations nine thousand miles from Buttercup had said they should. Mr. Menzies made a speech sometimes and told them that all this was terribly important to Australians, and failed to convince them. The only thing from all these distant places that really touched the graziers was the food shortage in England; they did not understand why that should be, but they sent food parcels copiously to their relations at home, and puzzled over their predicament. They could not understand why English people would not come to this good country that had treated them so well.
    The two wives came out and joined their men on the veranda. Jane said, “Ann’s been telling me about Peter Loring falling off his horse, Jack. Did you hear about that?”
    Her husband shook his head. “That one of the Loring boys, from Balaclava?”
    She nodded. “The little one—eleven or twelve years old. You tell him, Ann.”
    Ann Pearson said, “It was a funny thing, Jack. I had to go into town early on Friday, about nine o’clock. Well, I got just up to the main road—I was all alone in the utility, and there was a pony, with a saddle on and bridle, grazing by the side of the road, and there was Peter Loring with blood all over him from scratches, sitting on the grass. So of course I stopped and got out and asked him what was the matter, and he said he fell off the pony; he was on his way to school. So I asked him if he was hurt, and he said it hurt him to talk and he felt funny.” She paused. “Well, there I was, all alone, and I didn’t know what to do, whether to take him home or what.And just then a truck came by, with a couple of those chaps from the lumber camp in it.”
    Jack Dorman said, “The camp up at Lamirra?”
    “That’s right. Well, this truck stopped and the men got down, and one of them came and asked what was the matter. New Australian he was, German or something—he spoke very foreign. So I told him and he began feeling the boy all over, and then the other man told me he was a doctor in his own country, but not here in Australia. He was a tall, thin fellow, with rather a dark skin, and black hair. So I asked him, ‘Is it concussion, Doctor?’ I said. Because, I was going to say we’d bring him back here, because this was closer.”
    She paused. “Well, he didn’t answer at once. He seemed a bit puzzled for the moment, and then he made little Peter open his mouth and took a look down his throat, and then he found some stuff coming out of his ear. And then he said, ‘It is not concussion, and the bleeding, that is nothing.’ He said, ‘He has ear disease, and he has a temperature. He should go at once to hospital in Banbury.’ My dear, of all the things to have, and that man finding it out so quick! Well, I felt his forehead myself, and it was awful hot, and so I asked the truck driver to go on to Balaclava and tell his mother, and I drove this doctor and Peter into town to the hospital. And Dr. Jennings was there, and he said it was a sort of mastoid—otitis something, he said.”
    “Pretty good, that,” said Jack Dorman.
    George Pearson said, “Dr. Jennings knew all about this chap. He’s a Czech, not a German. He works up at the camp there, doing his two years.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “He did tell me, but I forgot. One of these foreign names, it was—Cylinder, or something. Not that, but something like it. Ann drove him back to Lamirra.”
    His wife said, “He