“Turn out the men!” and Wall went into a shed and came out with his saddle on his arm.
The fire rushed down the blind gully. Showers of sparks fell on the bush fence, it caught twice, and they put it out, but the third time it blazed and roared and a fire-engine could not have stopped it.
“The wheat must go,” said Ross. “We’ve done our best,” and he threw down the blackened bough and leaned against a tree, and covered his eyes with a grimy hand.
The wheat was patchy in that corner—there were many old stumps of trees, and there were bare strips where the plough had gone on each side of them. Mary saw a chance, and climbed the fence.
“Come on, Bob,” she cried, “we might save it yet. Mr Ross, pull out the fence along there,” and she indicated a point beyond the fire. They tramped down and tore up the wheat where it ran between the stumps—the fire was hissing and crackling round and through it, and just as it ran past them in one place there was a shout, a clatter of horses’ hoofs on the stones, and Mary saw her father riding up the track with a dozen men behind him. She gave a shriek and ran straight down, through the middle of the wheat, towards the hut.
Wall and his men jumped to the ground, wrenched green boughs from the saplings, and, after twenty minutes’ hard fighting, the crop was saved—save for a patchy acre or so. When it was all over Ross sat down on a log and rested his head on his hands, and his shoulders shook. Presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Wall.
“Shake hands, Ross,” he said.
And it was Christmas Day.
But in after years they used to nearly chaff the life out of Mary. “You were in a great hurry to put on the breeches, weren’t you, Mary?” “Bob’s best Sunday-go-meetin’s, too, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Rather tight fit, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Couldn’t get ’em on now, could you, Mary?”
“But,” reflected old Peter apart to some cronies, “it ain’t every young chap as gits an idea of the shape of his wife afore he marries her—is it? An’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”