“Then we saw a sheep coming up out of the smoke at the end of the gully. Another followed, and another, and then more, until every blessed one of the twenty was there (though we didn’t stop to count ’em then, I can tell you!) Last of all—it just seemed years—came Norah!
“We could hear her shouting at the sheep before we saw her. They were terribly hard to move. She banged them with sticks, and the last old ram she fairly kicked up the hill. They were just out of the gully when the fire roared up it, and a minute or so after that we got to her.
“Poor little kid; she was just black, and nearly blind with the smoke. It was making her cry like fun,” said Jim, quite unconscious of his inappropriate simile. “I don’t know if it was smoke in his case, but so was Dad. We put the fire out quick enough; it was easy work to keep it in the gully. Indeed, Dad never looked at the fire, or the sheep either. He just jumped off Bosun, and picked Norah up and held her as if she was a baby, and she hugged and hugged him. They’re awfully fond of each other, Dad and Norah.”
“And were the sheep all right?” Harry asked.
“Right as rain; not one of the black-faced beauties singed. It was a pretty close thing, you know,” Jim said reminiscently. “The fire was just up to Norah as she got the last sheep up the hill; there was a hole burnt in the leg of her riding skirt. She told me afterwards she made up her mind she was going to die down in that beastly hole.”
“My word, you must have been jolly proud of her!” Wally exclaimed. “Such a kid, too!”
“I guess we were pretty proud,” Jim said quietly. “All the people about made no end of a fuss about her, but Norah never seemed to think a pennyworth about it. Fact is, her only thought at first was that Dad would think she had broken her promise to him. She looked up at him in the first few minutes, with her poor, swollen old eyes. ‘I didn’t forget my promise, Dad, dear,’ she said. ‘I never touched the fire—only chased your silly old sheep!’”
“Was that the end of the fire?” Harry asked.
“Well, nearly. Of course we had to watch the burning logs and stumps for a few days, until all danger of more fires was over, and if there’d been a high wind in that time we might have had trouble. Luckily there wasn’t any wind at all, and three days after there came a heavy fall of rain, which made everything safe. We lost about two hundred and fifty acres of grass, but in no time the paddock was green again, and the fire only did it good in the long run. We reckoned ourselves uncommonly lucky over the whole thing, though if Norah hadn’t saved the Shropshires we’d have had to sing a different tune. Dad said he’d never shut up so much money in one small paddock again!”
Jim bobbed his float up and down despairingly.