The Crooked Stick; Or, Pollie's Probation

The time, the close of a lurid sultry February day, towards the end of a long, dry summer succeeding a rainless winter, in the arid region of West Logan. A blood-red sun sinking all too slowly, yet angrily, into a crimson ocean; suddenly disappearing, as if in despotic defiance of all future rainfall. A fiery portent receding into the inferno of a vast conflagration, was the image chiefly presented to the dwellers in that pastoral desert, long heartsick with hope deferred.
The scene, a limitless stretch of plain—its wearisome monotony feebly broken by belts of timber or an infrequent pine-ridge. The earth adust. A hopeless, steel-blue sky. The atmosphere stagnated, breezeless. The forest tribes all dumb. The Wannonbah mail-coach toiling over the furrows of a sandhill, walled in by a pine thicket.
'Thank God! the sun is down at last; we must sight Hyland's within the hour,' exclaimed the passenger on the box-seat, a tall, handsome man, with 'formerly in the army' legibly impressed on form and feature. 'How glad I shall be to see the river; and what a luxury a swim will be!'
'Been as hot a day as ever I know'd, Captain,' affirmed the sun-bronzed driver, with slow decision; 'but'—and here he double-thonged the off-wheeler, as if in accentuation of his statement—'heat, and flies, and muskeeters, dust and sand and bad water, ain't the wust of this road—not by a long chalk!'
'What the deuce can be worse?' demanded the ex-militaire, with pardonable acerbity. 'Surely no ruffians have taken to the bush lately in this part of the world?'
'Well, I did hear accidental-like as The Doctor and two other cross chaps, whose names I won't say, had laid it out to stick us up to-day. They'd heard that Mr. Tracknell was going up to Orange, and they have it in for him along o' the last Bandamah cattle racket.'
'Stop the coach, the infernal scoundrels! What do they expect to do next? The country won't be fit for decent people to live in if this sort of thing is not put a stop to.'