Mrs. Cameron was gazing at the ruins of her home.
"What is it?" she asked, hearing his voice, low as it as pitched. "Oh, you've got a bad burn?"
She went towards him, distress in her eyes.
"It's nothing at all; it doesn't matter!" He edged away from her so that she should not see. "When you and Davey are fixed up, Mrs. Cameron, Deirdre and I must get along and see how Steve and the school fared."
They found some flour, bread and tea in stone jars among the ruins of the kitchen. Davey milked the cows. Mrs. Cameron and Jenny built a fire in the yard, and when they had all breakfasted on the scorched bread and some tea, Mrs. Cameron wanted to put flour on the Schoolmaster's burn. But he said that it was not worth bothering about and would have nothing done for it.
CHAPTER XVI
For months after the fires every settler in the hills was felling and carting timber. New homes were built on the débris of the old. Scarcely a house in the district had escaped the hunger of the flames. A burnt-out family lived in a tent, in a lean-to of bagging and bark, or in what was left of the walls, roofs and doors of houses, jammed together to form some sort of shelter against the weather.
Every pair of hands were busy trying to get the new homes up before the autumn rains; and money was scarce. Most of the settlers had lost cattle and horses as well as their homesteads, sheds and crops.
The wind that had driven the smoke and flames billowing before it brought a downpour which quenched the fire the morning after it had swept the southern slopes of the hills. For days it rained steadily. Light vertical showers soaked into the blackened earth. There was every prospect of a good season to make up for the damage done by the fires. Rain on fired earth makes for fertility, good grain, fat stock and an abundant harvest. The settlers worked like beavers to be ready for it, the prospect of a good season heartening their labours and leavening their disappointment at having again to do all the building and fencing that had been done only a few years before.