“You’d best stay here.”

“That’s right,” assented Jo, evidently in the know about this move. “We’d best stay here.”

“Bring up yer things from the tent. You two can doss in the store along with the kid. She used to sleep in there and won’t mind you.”

“Oh Mumma, I never did,” interrupted the kid.

“Shut yer lies! An’ Mr Jo can ’ave this room.”

It sounded a ridiculous arrangement, but it was useless to attempt to cross them, they were too far gone. While the woman sketched the plan of action, Jo sat, abnormally solemn and red, his eyes bulging, and pulling at his moustache.

“Give us a lantern,” said Jim, “I’ll go down to the paddock.”

We two went together. Rain whipped in our faces and the wind howled and raged about us as we ran though the deepening dark. We behaved like two wild children let loose, laughing and hooting as though giving in to the madness of the night would save us from harm. We came back still in high spirits to the whare to find the kid already bedded in the counter of the store.

The woman brought us a lamp. Jo took his bundle from Jim, the door was shut.

“Good-night all,” shouted Jo.

Jim and I sat on two sacks of potatoes. For the life of us we could not stop laughing. Strings of onions and half-hams dangled from the ceiling, wherever we looked there were advertisements for ‘Camp Coffee’ and tinned meats. We pointed at them and when we tried to read them aloud were overcome with laughter and hiccoughs. The kid in the counter stared at us. She threw off her blanket and scrambled to the floor, where she stood in her grey flannel night-gown, rubbing one leg against the other. We paid no attention to her.

“Wot are you laughing at?” she said, uneasily.

“You!” shouted Jim. “The red tribe of you, my child.”

She flew into a rage and beat herself with her hands. “I won’t be laughed at, you curs!” He swooped down upon the child and swung her on to the counter.

“Go to sleep, Miss Smarty, or make a drawing. Here’s a pencil. You can use Mumma’s account book.”

Through the rain we heard Jo creak over the boarding of the next room, the sound of a door being opened and then shut to.

“It’s the loneliness,” whispered Jim.

“One hundred and twenty-five different ways. Alas, my poor brother!”

The kid tore out a page and flung it at me.

“There you are,” she said. “Now I done it ter spite Mumma for shutting me up ’ere with you two. I done the ones she told me I never ought to. I done the pictures she told me she’d shoot me if I did. Don’t care! Don’t care!”

The kid had drawn a picture of a woman shooting at a man with a rook rifle and another of her digging a hole to bury him in. Beside that was a childish scrawling of the woman hanging by a rope from the old macrocarpa-tree by the creek, and the fourth, final picture showed a mound of dirt edged with paua shells, and the woman, dragging herself out of the earth with red, clawing hands.

“This is what you saw?” I asked. The drunk laughter had drained from me in an instant. “Your mother?”

“She told me I never ought to draw it, but I don’t care,” repeated the child, her eyes blue and wild. “And she told me I never ought to bury nothing in my garden no more. It ain’t fair. That garden growed me all manner of animals back.”

She jumped off the counter and huddled down on the floor biting her nails.

“You mean she’s dead?” said Jim.

“Don’t care,” whispered the girl, clutching her knees and rocking from side to side.