The moonlight was waning. The silver light in which the forest had been bathed an hour before, was dimmer, the shadows the house and sheds cast black against it. Where the light struck dead trees they stood out wraith-like from the dark wave of the forest.
Listening intently, she heard the distant cracking of whips, the long lowing, belched and terrified cries of cattle.
CHAPTER XXXII
When McNab awakened in the morning, he realised that his sleep had been too heavy for him to know what had happened during the night, and that much might have occurred while he was snoring.
Farrel found him snapping and biting like a trapped dingo. His voice rasped; his inquisitive, suspicious eyes were everywhere. But the Schoolmaster had none of the air of a victorious gamester, and Deirdre's amiability was of a pattern with what he had imagined it the night before. He had heard Davey and Conal ride out at dawn with a cracking of whips and yelping of dogs to wake the saints. That seemed to negative the suggestion that they had been out all night. They were going to muster a couple of hundred of Maitland's cattle in some paddocks near Red Creek, he remembered the Schoolmaster had said.
Yet by the cold light of early morning, he had an unaccountable sensation of having been tricked. What with the girl's smiles and Steve's grog he had not been as wide awake as he had intended to be, he knew. Farrel's readiness to consider the school proposition irritated him. It had been a pretext; his only anxiety was not to discuss it any more. He was all fret and fume to get back to the Wirree. Nothing would stay him.
When he was up in his high-seated spring-cart, there was none of the complaisant geniality of the night before about him. He gathered up his reins with a sour smile at the little group assembled on Steve's verandah and drove out of sight at a jolting jog-trot.
"The boys got the mob?" Steve asked anxiously.
The Schoolmaster took off his hat with a sigh.