face from his warm food that he'd started on without ever looking up. He stood over that 'roo for ten seconds staring me in the eyes. Then the skin wrinkled back from his snout, and the fangs were so white and clean as death itself, and a low growl came out of his ugly throat. 'Come on, you swine,' it said as plain as words. I didn't you bet. I backed out of that beastly grass.
"The next one I saw was a dead one. And beside him lay the boss' best staghound, that had been trained to tackling wild boars since he was a pup: dead as well. The cat had come fossicking round our camp on the Madden River.
"My gad, though, but the size of the brute, and muscle like you couldn't find in any other beast. I looked at the claws on the pads. They're as sharp as a lancet, and they'd tear the guts out of a man before he could squeak. It was good-bye 'roo, that time.
"They put that yarn in the Bulletin. And some chap wrote and said it was a stiff 'un, and the wild cat must be descended from escaped tame cats, because this country has no pussy aboriginal of any sort. Couldn't say myself, except I saw that tiger-cat, and it didn't look much like the son of a homely tissey, either. Wonder what put the thing in my head. Perhaps Kangaroo's fat belly."
"He's not so very fat," said Somers.
"No, he's not got what you'd call a corporation and a whole urban council in front of him. Neither is he flat just there, like you and me."
Kangaroo arrived the next day at Torestin with a large bunch of violets in his hand; pale, expensive, late winter violets. He took off his hat to Harriet and bowed quite deep, without shaking hands. He had been a student at Munich.
"Oh, how do you do!" cried Harriet. "Please don't look at the horrid room, we leave in the morning."
Kangaroo looked vacantly around. He was not interested, so he saw nothing: he might as well have been blind.
"It's a very nice room," he said. "May I give you the violets? The poet said you liked having them about."
She took them in her two hands, smelling their very faint fragrance.
