Free Best Australian Short Stories by Douglas Stewart, Beatrice Davis Page A

I camps here in the hut, day by day, and hears them bumbling away up the valley, putting in the kiln and lighting it. Then when it’s time to draw it, I goes up to the kiln, but no Piety.
    “‘He’s not turned up,’ says the quarryman.
    “‘And not likely,’ says I, ‘with a ki’ful o’ stone. I’d be ashamed to look a man in the face,’ I says. So I sets to work and draws the kiln as usual. But no Piety. And what’s more, he wasn’t about his hut, nor nowheres. Then I begins to think and think, and I draws that kiln slow and steady. But at last I draws a sort of bit o’ whitestick—lime like the rest. I has a good look at it, and then says to myself, says I—”
    Here the maundering old man paused, looking into space, then pulling himself together went on:
    “I says to myself: ‘Here he comes, feet first. I thought as much! It was the shin-bone.”
    “Whose shin-bone?” I demanded.
    “Why, old Piety’s, of course,” he replied.
    “What?—he’d fallen into the kiln?” I asked, horrified.
    The old man turned viciously upon me for damaging his story.
    “There you go,” he cried—“blurting the thing out! Why, of course he’d fell in the kiln—what else would he do? There were his tracks to the kiln edge, and a few bricks gone where he lost his footing. Well, I jus’ leaves it there and put a bag over it. Then I goes down to Bill—a-digging in the orchard—and says to him: ‘About this here contrack. Will you ’gree to let me have the contrack after the old man’s dead?’
    “That’s looking ahead with a vengeance,’ he says, grinning.
    “‘Never mind,’ I says. ‘Good understandings makes long frien’s,’ I says.
    “’Oh, just as you like,’ he says, digging away. ‘I’m not too pertickler!’
    “‘That’s a bargain?’ I asks.
    “‘That’s a bargain,’ he says, just to be rid o’ me. Then I says to him: ‘Come up to the kiln, I want yer to help me awhile.’ So he comes. Then I takes the bag off the bones. ‘Look at that!’ I says. “‘Well,’ says he, ‘and what about it?’
    “I says, ‘that’s your respected gran’father; leastwise all that’s left of him.’
    You could have knocked him down with a feather. When he come to see it all he took on dreadful.
    “’Good Gawd,’ he says, and, ‘’Orrible! ’Orrible!’
    “Then says I: ‘Be a man! It might have been wuss. It might have been me, ’ I says—’or yerself,’ I says. It might have been me — and then who’s to burn the lime?’ But he took on all the same. He took that dreadful a view of it. Oho!” quavered the old fellow, wagging his head: “He took a gloomy view of it, a very gloomby view of it!”
    “‘Now you go away!’ I says to him, ‘and I’ll draw this lime and bag it.’
    “‘Bag that lime!’ says he, ‘and my gran’father amongst it!’
    “’My wages is in it,’ I says, firm, ‘but I’ll get what I can of him out,’ and so I did, and put the bone or two on the shed roof, away from the childer. Put ’em there not thinking, for there came a shower of rain while I was away for the cart, and when I got back the bones had all slacked up.
    “But look ye here,” went on the old man confidentially, “I had my own little idee so as old Piety’d not be lost sight of altogether. I takes about harf the lime the bones made—real lime, mind you—and makes up a bit of mortar for this here chimbley—which I was building at the time. So you see these here bricks and that bit mortar? Well, I reckon that’s old Piety’s monument. But as for the rest, Bill he buried it in the orchard, and when the perlice came up there was nothing left but the buttons.”

A. B. Patterson

THE CAST-IRON CANVASSER
     
    THE firm of Sloper and Dodge, publishers and printers, was in great distress. These two enterprising individuals had worked up an enormous business in time-payment books, which they sold all over Australia by means of canvassers. They had put all the money they had