In due course the ‘highly connected’ one arrived, bringing with him as much luggage as sufficed to fill the extra room. He was a tall, good-looking Englishman, and he gazed around at the small bare house with its strip of burnt-up, dusty garden, and background of sombre eucalypti; at the squalid ‘hut;’ the sluggish, dirty river; and the barren forlornness of everything, with a look on his face that caused Mr Barton to chuckle, and think to himself that the new-comer’s stay would be short. The manager had expected a youngster, not a grown man of five or six and twenty, and he was rather puzzled. This self-possessed, languid sort of gentleman, with well-cut features, long moustache, and slow, pleasant-sounding, if rather drawling, speech, wasn’t by any means the sort of creature that Mr Barton was accustomed to associate with the term ‘jackaroo,’ and its natural corollary, ‘licking into shape.’ ‘A fellow with lots of money, I expect,’ he said to Daisy that night after their guest, pleading fatigue, had retired. ‘One of those chaps who just come out to have a look around, and then off home again with wonderful stories about the wild Australian Bush.’ ‘Yaas; shouldn’t wondah, now, Mistah Barton, if you ah not quaite correct,’ laughed Daisy, mischievously. ‘Oh, papa, do all the folk in England talk as if they were clean knocked up?’ ‘Only the highly-connected ones, my dear,’ replied her father, smiling. ‘It’s considered quite fashionable, too, amongst our own upper ten. He’ll lose it after he’s been bushed a few times. I shouldn’t imagine from his looks, however, that he’s got much backbone. He’ll be away again presently—too rough a life.’ And, in fact, poor Fortescue at first often did get bushed. Luckily for him, perhaps, a camp of blacks settled at Tarnpirr shortly after his arrival, and these made a regular income by hunting for and bringing him back. And he was very considerate. Once, when he had been missing for three days, and Mr Barton and Daisy were half out of their minds with fright, he made the blacks who were bearing him home, tattered and hungry, and faint from exposure, go ahead for clean clothes and soap and water before he would put in an appearance. This incident only confirmed Mr Barton the more in his idea that he had to do with a man lacking strength of character—a dandy willing to sacrifice everything to personal outward show. His daughter thought quite otherwise. However, in time, ‘Barton’s Jackaroo,’ as he was called throughout the district of the lower rivers, became a favourite, not only at Tarnpirr, but on the neighbouring runs. Even old Bridget admitted that ‘he was a good sort ov a cratur, barrin’ the want ov a bit more life wid him.’ But he was always calm and self-possessed; and the Manager was accustomed to swear that a bush fire at his heels wouldn’t make him quicken his pace by a step.