Well for him that he was fleet of foot as well as strong of limb, for he only just reached the little barren spot before the broad arms of the fire met again in a silent embrace that would have cut him off for ever. The great flames soared up higher and stronger with a sweeping flare, as they came together again, but boy and dog had passed between them.
"Geordie, Geordie!" said Alec, "what a frightful risk to run; you had no right to do it."
"But I couldn't leave Como to burn."
"I fear he is dead after all."
But he was not; there was life in the old dog yet, and after they had poured water over him and down his throat he showed signs of life, and feebly licked the face of his master, who was stooping over him.
"Well," said Geordie at supper time, when coolness had come with the night, and they were eating the wallaby that Murri had succeeded in killing. "Well, we ought to be a united party after this. Everybody seems to have been saving and helping everybody else."
"It has been a day of terrible dangers," answered Alec, "but—let me whisper it, Geordie—I have enjoyed it. It is an awful thing to say, perhaps, but anything so grand as that one leap into the great sheet of flame I never felt. It was worth years of ordinary living."
That night it was long before the lads could get to rest; they had been excited too intensely by the adventurous day they had passed through for sleep to visit them quickly. Murri, who seemed to have no more nerve than a jelly-fish, after a few philosophical remarks upon the advisability of going to sleep at once, had wrapped himself in his blanket and fallen asleep at the same moment. The night had grown cooler, for the hot wind ceased to blow at about sunset, and the heavy pall of smoke having rolled away, the quiet stars shone down upon them from a sky that was clear and deep once more. The fire, which seemed to have received a check at one of the great deep gullies they had crossed in the morning, looked as though it were dying down, although now and again the eastern sky throbbed with a ruddy glow as some little patch of scrub or bush caught fire and flared up brightly in the blue still night.
How solemn was the great silence of that wide expanse which, for a time, was deprived of all life! Every breathing thing had fled before the fire, and a silence as of death reigned over all the land. The lads, for all their bold spirit and boyish lack of sentiment, felt the impressiveness of it at last, and, ceasing their chattering, sank into a stillness which soon flowed into sleep.
Night crept on; the moon sank behind the grave white peaks of the mountains that from their heights watched for the dawn of the day; the steady-pacing hours swept over the burnt black earth; and then in the fulness of its time the east glowed again, but with a rose that was not the rose of ruin and fire but the warmth and glory of a new day's birth.