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Updated: June 9, 2025
Ellen Harriott was called in to assist, and the two girls had a real good afternoon, looking at and talking over clothes and jewellery. The things had come fairly well out of the coach disaster. When an English firm makes a water-tight cover for a bag or box, it is water-tight; even the waters of Kiley's River had swept over the canvas of Miss Grant's luggage in vain.
All the flats along Kiley's River were knee-deep in green grass.
There were no neighbours except at the township of Kiley's Crossing, which consisted of two public-houses and a store. It was a rough life for the young squatter, and evidently he found it lonely; for on a visit to Sydney he fell in love with and married a dainty girl of French descent.
The boy was about twelve years of age, and had just ridden a half-broken horse a forty-mile journey for of such is the youth of Australia. Patsy was wet and dirty, and the big leather mail-bag that he handed over had evidently been under water. "We had to swim, Mr. My oath!" Hugh laughed. "I expect Kiley's River will get you yet, Patsy," he said. "Go in now to the kitchen and get dry by the fire.
As the team bore them along at a flying trot, they climbed higher and higher up the range; at last, as they rounded a shoulder of the hillside, the whole valley of Kiley's River lay beneath them, stretching away to the far blue foothills. Beyond again was a great mountain, its top streaked with snow.
By four in the afternoon they reached Kiley's River, running yellow and froth-covered with melting snow. The coachman pulled his horses up on the bank, and took a good, long look at the bearings. As they waited, the Kuryong vehicle came down on the other side of the river. "There's Mr. Gordon," said the coachman. "I don't think he'll try it. I reckon it's a trifle deep for me.
This girl looked as if she would give trouble; might even expect clean beds and clean sheets when there were none within the hotel, and might object to fleas, of which there were plenty. So the landlady pulled herself together, and decided to speed the parting guest as speedily as possible. "Mr. Gordon couldn't git in," she said. The coach is going down to Kiley's Crossing to-day.
The letter that he took out of it was a strange jewel to repose in so rude a casket. It also was from Kuryong from Ellen Harriott, who had taken the precaution of addressing it in a feigned hand so that the postmaster and postmistress at Kiley's Crossing, who handled all station letters, would not know that she was corresponding with Blake. The letter was a great contrast to Mrs. Gordon's.
The pioneers of these small settlers were old Morgan Donohoe and his wife, who had built the hotel at Kiley's Crossing; and, on their reports, all their friends and relatives, as they came out of the "ould country," worked their way to Kuryong, and built little bits of slab and bark homesteads in among the mountains. The rougher the country, the better they liked it.
Other strangers and outlanders came to settle in the district, but from the original settlement up to the date of our story the two great families of the Doyles and the Donohoes governed the neighbourhood, and the headquarters of the clans was at Donohoe's "Shamrock Hotel," at Kiley's Crossing.
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