Denis had heard enough. He was not easily discouraged, but he found it a relief to turn his attention to the scenery. They were intersecting a forest of rather stunted trees, all blown one way by the wind, which made music of a peculiar melancholy among their branches. Doherty said the trees were she-oaks, answering Denis's question with great zeal. Similarly Denis learned the names of the various parrots that perched by the flock amid the dull green foliage, or fled from tree to tree with a whirr and a glint of every colour in the rainbow. Then a pond must be called a water-hole, it seemed--a beck a creek, and the curly-bearded aboriginals blacks or blackfellows--but not niggers. It was the earliest and most elementary stage of Denis's colonial training, and he would have relished it if only for his mentor's intense satisfaction in his task, to say nothing of a capacity to teach not inferior to the will. But the hawker had a last word left, which he kept, as though by demoniac design, for one of their glimpses, depressing enough to Denis as it was, of the sparkling sea never many miles distant on their right. "Ah!" said the hawker, pointing with his whip, "if I'd been one hour earlier in Geelong, I'd have sold lock, stock, barrel an' ammunition for a berth in that ship that cleared out for Old England this forenoon. Ship from Melbourne you can't get. It was a chance in a hundred, and I'd have given all I have for it, as you will for such another before you've seen half as much as me." It was about three in the afternoon, at a place called Wyndham, that the pair took their leave of this dispassionate pessimist, with as little regret as may be supposed, and found themselves afoot for the last twenty miles. And almost from the first step Doherty was loud in his denunciation of every word the hawker had uttered, not one of which was Denis to believe for an instant. But there was no Denis left to embrace this view; the leave-taking of the morning and the hawker in the afternoon had reduced him between them to unmitigated Dent, a dogged fellow ready for the worst, though more than ever bent upon the best. "There are two sides to everything, and give me the dark side first," said he; "besides, a lift for nothing is a lift for nothing. But what's that you've got in your pack, Jim?" "What's what?" asked Doherty, changing colour as he trudged. "There's a box of some sort showing through your outer blanket." "Oh, that's my revolver." "Your revolver! You hadn't one this morning. Who's given it to you?" demanded Denis. "No one," the boy confessed. "I bought it from the hawker while you were on the ship." "And how much did you give for this?" asked Denis, as they squatted by the roadside, with a neat oak case open between them, and a great five-chambered Deane and Adams twinkling in the sun. "Ten guineas, mister."