“Good God!” said Hill, and fear got hold of him suddenly. He roused his horse to a canter for the sake of the noise of the motion. The sky appalled him, and a peculiar sense of reversion took him. He was hung over depths, and seemed to cling to the suspended earth.
“I’m crazy myself,” said Hill, with a quiver in his voice. And his very voice broke the silence like a pistol shot. It made him start until he heard a sheep’s faint baa in the distance. And then a mopoke called its mate in the trees by an old dry creek. Hill pulled up.
“But it ain’t a creek after all,” he said to himself. “It’s a Billabong, but it’s twenty years since water came out of the Lachlan so far as Warribah, and Grear put a dam there fifteen years ago. Ah! if the river only rose up, and came down roarin’. But it won’t; it won’t.”
As he dreamed of the river, now like a low water-hole with never a current in it, Wilson, at home, lay in an uneasy sleep. He, too, dreamed, and dreamed of rain, and he woke himself shouting, “Rain!” and in his confusion called “Mary” to his wife five hundred miles away.
“Oh God! I dreamt it again,” he said. “I dreamed of rain in our old place east, and the river came down with thunder and floods, and the land grew green in an hour—green, green!”
He fell asleep again, and when he woke at dawn he was oddly cheerful. Perhaps the rest from anxiety in that happy dream had taken part of the strain from his weary mind.
“I do feel as if it had rained somewhere,” he said; “and if the weather only breaks anywhere we may have it here.”
“Don’t you think it cooler?” he said to Hill next morning. But the sky was brass and the sun white hot.
That evening a man riding through to Conoble from Condobolin told him that he had heard it had rained east of Forbes. And another man who camped at the Ten-Mile Clump said he knew there had been a great thunderstorm to the east.
“I dreamed it, so I did!” cried Wilson; “and the Lachlan’s coming down.”