"What pile was that?" Moira queried quickly. "I didn't see any."
"Mr. Cumshaw passed a pile in the bushes as we came along," I said off-handedly. "The heat must have rendered the stones down."
She accepted my explanation at its face value.
"No wonder the place remained hidden," I ran on. "If you'll look over east, where there should be a lone tree, you won't find any. It's wattle everywhere you look. The fire cleared out all the trees and forced the wattle on in their place. If you came by here on any side but the one we came by you'd take this to be just an ordinary hollow full of wattle."
"You're talking nothing else but wattle," Cumshaw interrupted. "What has the wattle to do with the fire anyway?"
"Why, don't you see?" I cried. "Without the fire there wouldn't have been any wattle here. The seed'll lie dormant in the ground for years sometimes; it takes great heat to germinate them. That's why wattle always springs up in profusion after there's been a bush fire. The same thing happens with grass, the coarser kinds, though to a lesser extent."
"I see," he said gravely. "It means that we are back just where we began."
"It doesn't mean anything of the sort," I said quickly. "All this is in our favor. We're better off than we were before."
"I don't see how that is," he replied.
"But it is," I persisted, "and I'll show you why when the time comes. And now there's plenty to be done. One of us has to go back for the provisions that we left behind last night, and the other's got to stop here with Miss Drummond and run up a bit of a bark humpy that'll keep off the wind and won't let the rain through. Now if you're as hungry as I am you'll understand just how pressing the need of that food is. It's you or I, Cumshaw. Which of us is to go?"