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Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had declined to speak with innumerable sympathetic cousins Vartreys and Fentons and Allardyces and Musgraves, to the fifth and sixth remove who had come from all quarters, with visiting-cards and low-voiced requests to be informed "if there is anything we can possibly do." Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body.
It bewildered Patricia, at first, to find that as concerned Lichfield at large any over-indulgence in alcohol by a member of the Musgrave family was satisfactorily accounted for by the matter-of-course statement that the Musgraves usually "drank," just as the Allardyces notoriously perpetuated the taint of insanity, and the Townsends were proverbially unable "to let women alone," and the Vartreys were deplorably prone to dabble in literature.
"They were good days, sir," he chuckled. "Heh, we'll stick to the old customs. We'll give a dinner and announce it at dessert, just as your honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia's betrothal " For about the Musgraves of Matocton there could be no question.
Sax knew why, but he seemed to feel the influence of his father coming from the Musgraves, not far away, telling him to keep the matter secret. The lads went back to bed, and the two white men kept watch at the troughs till daylight. But the blacks gave no sign of their presence. They had evidently been scared away. Mustering
It was a word to strike terror to the heart; a word which at once called to mind everything which was bad and treacherous and cruel about natives; a word which told of the last great stronghold of the blacks which white men had tried and tried again to take from them but without success. Sax and Vaughan looked at one another when the dreaded word "Musgraves" caught their ear.
It was the first time for four years she had been guilty of such an indiscretion, she was shortly afterward explaining to various members of the Musgraves' house-party. It was the heat, no doubt. But since everybody insisted upon it, she would very willingly toast them in another bumper of aromatic spirits of ammonia. "Just look at that, Rudolph! you've spilt it all over your coat sleeve.
And the monks had great flocks, so they rented their lands to companies of four fighting men; and one of the four was to be ready day and night to protect the sheep, and the Scots kept them busy. Eh? What?" "The Musgraves and Armstrongs and Netherbys, I know," and the cloud passed from her face; and to the clatter of her horse's hoofs, she lilted merrily a stanza of an old border song:
But bushman friendships are not based on bank balances, and the two had remained good friends. As a proof of this, the last time they had met, Pat had told the drover about a gold-mine he knew of in the Musgrave Ranges. At first Stobart laughed at the old Irishman, for there were as many reputed gold-mines in the Musgraves as there were men who had gone after them and not come back.
For Colonel Musgrave was by birth the lineal head of all the Musgraves of Matocton, which is in Lichfield, as degrees are counted there, equivalent to what being born a marquis would mean in England. Handsome and trim and affable, he defied chronology by looking ten years younger than he was known to be.
Sax had a grey mare named Fair Steel to ride in the mornings, and Ginger, a gelding, for the afternoons. Vaughan's two were both geldings: Boxer, a brown, and Don Juan, a tall black. All four horses were well-bred and thoroughly suitable for the month's hard work which lay ahead of them. The plant made straight for the Musgraves.
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