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By nine o'clock Mac and Tam had arrived, and after everything had been sufficiently admired, we trooped in a body to the kitchen, obedient to a call from Cheon.
"Me new cook, me " and then Sam appeared and towed him into port. "Well, I'm blest!" Dan exclaimed, staring after him. "What HAVE we struck?" But Johnny knew, as did most Territorians. "You've struck Cheon, that's all," he said. "Talk of luck! He's the jolliest old josser going."
Also after a buffeting Cheon w as generally persuaded an evil spirit dwelt within certain Willy-Willys. But there is even a limit to keeping things humming during a Territory November; and things coming to a climax in a succession of dry thunderstorms, two cows died in the yards from exhaustion, and Dan was obliged to "chuck it."
Some of our belongings Cheon thoroughly approved of; others were passed over as unworthy of notice; and others were held up to chuckling ridicule. The photographs of friends and relatives were looked carefully over, the womenfolk being judged by what they might bring in a Chinese matrimonial market. "My word! That one good-looking.
But the plum-pudding was yet to come, and only Cheon was worthy to carry it to the feast; and as he came through the leafy way, bearing the huge mottled ball, as big as a bullock's head all ablaze with spirits and dancing light and crowned with mistletoe it would have been difficult to say which looked most pleased with itself, Cheon or the pudding; for each seemed wreathed in triumphant smiles.
Our camp being a stationary one, was, by comparison with our ordinary camps, a campe-de-luxe; for, apart from the tent-fly, in it were books, pillows, and a canvas lounge, as well as some of the flesh-pots of Egypt, in the shape of eggs, cakes, and vegetables sent out every few days by Cheon, to say nothing of scrub turkeys, fish, and such things.
He was easily disposed of, and within a week we were back at the homestead. We had left Cheon sad and disconsolate, but he met us, filled with fury, and holding a sack of something soft in his arms. "What's 'er matter?" he spluttered, almost choking with rage. "Me savey grow cabbage "; and he flung the sack at our feet as we stood in the homestead thoroughfare staring at him in wonder.
The elder lads, one fourteen and one ten years of age, found Cheon by far the most entertaining incongruity at the dinner, and when dinner was over after we had settled down on the various chairs and stumps that had been carried out to the verandah again they shadowed him wherever he went.
Cheon was enraptured with the appearance of his company, and worked, and slaved, and chuckled in the kitchen as only Cheon could, until at last the critical moment had arrived. Dinner was ready, but an unforeseen difficulty had presented itself.
The threepenny bits safely in, it took the united efforts of the homestead to get the pudding into a cloth and thence into a boiler, while Cheon explained that it would have been larger if only we had had a larger boiler to hold it. As it was, it had to be boiled out in the open, away from the buildings, where Cheon had constructed an ingenious trench to protect the fire from rain and wind.
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