Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/47

It was in the afternoons that Tony felt fully alive. Then he went rabbiting with the other boys, or helped the men; Robertson liked him to do varied work so as to get an understanding of all branches of station business. He had offered to pay him, but gave up the idea for the first year, seeing that it only made the boy uncomfortable. He was getting board and rations and schooling, he said, and other teaching too. That was true enough, and “anyhow, it didn’t matter.” Robertson was not one to insist on trifles.

Eighteen months passed, and Tony grew strong and tall, and brown as saddle-leather into the bargain. He could ride and he could shoot, and swim like a fish; he felt three times as much a man as before he came to Paranui, and that of itself would have made him happy. But there was one element there which meant constant friction. Baldwin had disliked him from the first, mainly because he was a protégé of Robertson’s, and he considered that Robertson showed the boy undue favour—at any rate, far too much attention. He might have liked Tony well enough if he himself had picked him up. Another reason was that the boy was “different”; reserved and self-sufficient—“a ball of side,” according to Baldwin, who himself was unpopular among the men, with good reason. He had an exceedingly ugly temper; he nagged, which was worse, and he had an unwise and disagreeable habit of “rowing” one man in front of the others. Tony was his particular aversion, and when Robertson was not present he used to address him in an elaborately sarcastic manner as the Little Toff, the Aristocrat, and like names—precisely the form of attack against which Tony was least proof. It infuriated him to madness, but he tried to keep his temper: it was a way of paying his debt to Robertson. The men sympathised, but sympathy was never much use to Tony, especially as