THE PIONEERS

by

KATHARINE S. PRICHARD

[Contents]

CHAPTER I

The wagon had come to rest among the trees an hour or two before sunset.

It was a covered-in dray, and had been brought to in a little clearing of the scrubby undergrowth. Two horses had drawn it all the way from the coast. Freed of their harness, they stood in the lee of a great gum, their flanks matted with the dust which had caked with the run of sweat on them. The mongrel that had followed at their heels lay stretched on the sward beside them. A red-dappled cow and her calf were tethered to a wheel of the wagon, and at a little distance from them were two battered crates of drooping and drowsy fowls.

On a patch of earth scraped clear of grass and leaves, the fire threw off wisps of smoke and the dry, musky incense of burning eucalyptus and dogwood. It had smouldered; and a woman, stooping beside it, was feeding it with branches of brushwood and sticks that she broke in her hands or across her knees.

A man was busy in the interior of the wagon, moving heavy casks and pieces of furniture. He lifted them out, piled them on the ground and spread a couple of sheepskins over them. Then he threw a sheepskin and a blanket of black and brown tweed on the floor for the night's resting.

It had been climbing the foothills for days, this heavy, old-fashioned vehicle, and the man and the woman had climbed with it, she driving the cow and calf, he giving his attention to the horses and clearing the track. So slowly had it toiled along that at a little distance it looked like some weary, indefatigable insect creeping among the trees. The horses—a sturdy young sandy-grey mare and a raw, weedy, weather-worn bay—seemed as much part of it as its wooden frame, ironshod wheels, and awning of grimy sailcloth.

They tugged at their load with dull, dumb patience and obstinacy, although the bay had stumbled rather badly the whole way. The man had put his shoulder to the wheel, helping the horses up the steep banks and long, slippery sidings. He had stood trembling and sweating with them when heavy places in the road were past, the veins knotted in his swarthy forehead, the bare column of his throat gasping for the mountain air. There was the same toiling faculty in him that there was in the horses—an instinct to overcome all difficulties by exertion of the muscles of his back.

The wagon had creaked garrulously on the long slopes, and stuttered and groaned up the steep hill sides. It had forded creeks, the horses splashing soberly through them and sending the spray into the air on either side. It had crashed over the undergrowth that encroached on the track, an ill-blazed stock route among the trees, and again and again the man had been obliged to haul aside fallen timber, or burn it where it lay, and cut away saplings, in order to make a new path.

The wagon was filled with boxes and bags of food stuffs and pieces of furniture. Inside it smelt like a grocer's shop; and it had trailed the mingled odour of meal, corned meat, hemp, iron, seed wheat, crude oil and potatoes through the virgin purity of the forest air. Beneath its floor, in wrappings of torn bags, straw and hessian, were lashed a wooden plough, a broad-bladed shovel, and half a dozen farming and carpentering tools. The fowls—a game rooster, a buff hen and a speckled pullet—hung in wicker baskets from wooden pegs at the back. They and the cow and her calf had wakened strange echoes in the forest, the rooster heralding every morning at dawn this advance guard of civilisation.

When the vehicle had reached the summit of the foothills, the track fell wavering into the green depths of the forest behind it, a wale of broken ferns, slain saplings, blue gums and myrtles, mown down as with a scythe by its wheels. The timbered hills fell away, wave upon wave, into the mists of the distance, and the plains stretched outward from them to the faintly glittering line the sea made on the dim horizon. Somewhere to the west on those grey plains, against the shore of an inlet, was the township of Port Southern from which they had come.

Donald Cameron, after studying a roughly-made plan and the wall of the forest about him, had taken the mare by her sandy forelock and turned the wagon in among the trees on the far side of a giant gum, blazed with a cross, on which the congealing sap had dried like blood. Steering a north-westerly course, the wagon had tacked among the trees and come to the clearing.

And now that all preparations for the night were made, he took the animals to the creek for water. It ran at the foot of the long, low hillside and could be heard crooning and gurgling under the leafy murmur of the forest.

Leaving the fire, the woman went to a fallen trunk, sat down and gazed into the shadows gathering among the trees. A rosy and saffron mist hung between their thronging boles. The peace of the after-glow held the hills, the chirring of insects and the shrill sweet calling of birds had quivered into silence. Only a leafy whispering stirred the quiet.

For a moment the fire of her clear spirit burnt low. Hope and courage were lost in dreams. There was wistfulness in her grey eyes as they went out before her, wistfulness and heartache. She seemed to be reading the scroll of the future, seeing a dim, mysterious unrolling of joys and sorrows with the eyes of her inner vision.

The sun had set when Cameron returned. He tethered the cow to the wheel of the wagon and clamped rusty hobbles about the horses' fetlocks. Then he looked towards the woman.

"Mary!" he called.

She did not hear, and he walked towards her.

A man of few words, Cameron did not speak as he searched his wife's face.

"I—I was dreaming," she said, looking up, startled at the sight of him.

"You're not grieving?" he asked.

There was a tremor in his voice, though its roughness almost covered that.

"No, not grieving," she said. "But thinking what it will be to us and our children, by and by, in this place. It is a new country and a new people we're making, they said at home, and I'm realising what they meant now."

"Aye. But it's a fine country!"

Cameron's eyes travelled the length of the clearing, over the slope of the hill. They took in the silent world of the trees, the rosy mist that still glowed between their slender, thronging stems. There was pride and an expression of sated hunger in his glance.

"It's all ours, this land about here," he said.

"Yes?"

Her eyes wandered too.

"I have worked all my days, till now," he said, reviving a bitter memory, "without so much as a plot of sour earth as big as y're handkerchief to call my own. Worked for other men, sweated the body and soul out of me ... and now, this is mine ... all this ... hundred acres ... and more when I'm ready for it, more, and more, and more...."

He paused a moment, all the emotion in him stirred and surging. Then, with a short-drawn breath that dismissed the past and dedicated thought and energy to the future, he went on:

"I marked this place when I came through to the Port with Middleton's cattle, last year. I'll run cattle—but I want to clear and cultivate too. Up there where there are trees now will be ploughed fields and an orchard soon. The house and barns'll be on the brow of the hill. By and by ... we shall have a name and a place in the country."

His wife's eyes were on his face. He had spoken as though he were taking an oath.

"No doubt it will be as you say, Donald," she said, with a faint sigh. "But it is a strange lonely land, indeed, without the sight of a roof in all the long miles we have come by. Never the sound of a human voice, or the lowing of cattle."

Donald Cameron did not reply. He was envisaging his schemes for the future. Not a man given to dreams, the thoughtful mood had taken him; his breath came and went in steady draughts. His face was set to the mould of his musing; there was determination in every line of it. A gloomy face it was, rough-cast, with deep set eyes.

His wife's words and the sigh that went with them were repeated in a remote brain cell.

"You should be giving thanks, not complaining," he said, his gaze returning to her. "We must do that now—give thanks for the journey accomplished."

And, as if it were the last duty of a well-spent day, he knelt on the grassy earth, and Mary knelt beside him.

Donald Cameron addressed his God as man speaks to man; yet his voice had a vibrating note as he prayed.

"O Lord," he said, "we thank Thee for having brought us in safety to our new home. We thank Thee for having brought us over the sea, through the storms and the troubles on the ship when there was nothing to eat but weevily biscuits, and the water stank, and there was like to be mutiny with the men in the chained gangs. We—we thank Thee, this woman and I. She is a good woman for a man to have with him when he goes to the ends of the earth to carve out a name and a place for himself."

He paused thoughtfully for a moment; and then went on:

"I have said all that before; but I have been thinking that it would do no harm to say it again now that we are ready to begin the new life, and will need all Thy help and protection, Lord. We thank Thee for having brought us all the miles from the coast, and the beasts and the wagon, in safety—though the bay horse I bought of Middleton's storekeeper is turning out badly. He was a poor bargain at the best of it—weak in the knee and spring-halted. Do Thou have a care of him. Lord. It will be a big loss to me if he is no use ... with all the clearing and carting there will be to do soon."

He talked a little longer to the Almighty, asking no favour, but intimating that he expected to be justly dealt by as he himself dealt by all men. In the matter of the bay, he said that he did not think a God-fearing man had been treated quite as well as, under the circumstances, he might have been; but he imputed no blame—except to Middleton's storekeeper—and gave thanks again.

A man of middle height, squarely built, Donald Cameron had the loosely slung frame of a farm labourer. The woman beside him, although her clothes were as poor and heavy as his, was more finely and delicately made. The hands clasped before her were long and slender.

The prayer ended, they rose from the grass. Cameron's eyes covered his wife. A gust of tenderness swept him.

"There was not what you might call much sentiment about our mating," he said. "But I doubt not it has come, Mary."

"Yes, Donald." Her clear eyes were lifted to his. "May I be a true and faithful wife to you."

"Y're not regretting at the long journey's end?" he asked.

"It's not that,"—a sigh went from her—"but that I'm not worthy of you."

"Whist," he said. "You're my woman—my wife. It's all done with, the past."

CHAPTER II

A few months later Mary Cameron's voice, as she sang lullabies to her baby, mingled with the forest murmur and the sounds that came from the clearing—the lowing of the cow, the clucking and cackle of fowls, the clang of Donald's axe as he ring-barked trees near the house.

A one-roomed hut, built of long, rough-barked saplings, ranged one above the other, and thatched with coarse reddish-brown bark, laid on in slabs, it stood on the brow of the hill not far from the wagon's first resting place. Its two doors, set opposite each other, opened, one towards the back hills and the other towards the creek and the cleared land on which a stubble of stumps still stood. The walls of the hut, inside, were plastered with the clayey hill soil which Mary had rammed into crevices between the saplings when daylight had at first showed in thin shining streaks, and the mountain breezes had crept chilly through them in the early mornings. She had made the floor of beaten clay too, and had gathered from the creek bed the grey and brown stones which Donald had built into the hearth and chimney with seams of lime and fine white sand that he had brought from the Port.

A window space had been left in the wall fronting the clearing; but there was no glass in it. At night, or when it rained, Mary hung a piece of hessian over the window. Two chairs were the only ready-made furniture of the room. The boxes and bales brought in the wagon were piled in a corner. A table, made of box-covers with sapling legs driven into the floor, was under the window, and a bed, on a wooden foundation strapped with green-hide, stood against the back wall. A few pieces of delft and white crockery glimmered on a shelf near the open fireplace, and below them, on another shelf, were stone jars and two or three pots and pans.

Donald's harness, saddle, stirrup-leathers and stock-whip hung on pegs near the back door. Among the bales and boxes, under a dingy muffling cloth, stood a spinning wheel, and, tied together with lengths of dusty yarn, the parts of a weaver's hand loom which Mary had brought from the old country. On Sundays, when a bright fire sparkled on the hearth, the mats of frayed hessian were spread on the floor, and she had put a jar filled with wild flowers on the table, her eyes brimmed with joy and tenderness as she gazed about her.

She had toiled all the summer out of doors with her husband to make their home, timber-cutting with him, grubbing stumps from the land, laying twigs and leaves in the stumps and lighting them so that the slow fires eating the wood left only charred shells to clear away. She had driven Lassie, the grey, backwards and forwards, drawing logs and tree trunks from the slope to the stack behind the house, and when the frames of the wagon shed, cow sheds and stable were up, had laced the brushwood to them. The weedy, brown nag that was Lassie's trace mate, during those first weeks in the hills had come down and got himself rather badly staked, and Donald had had to shoot him. It cost him a good deal to fire that shot, but he had worked the harder for it.

Mary watched the cow while she browsed on the edge of the forest before a paddock on the top of the hill was fenced. She milked, fed the calf and the fowls, and carried water from the creek to the house. When she was not doing any of these things, or baking, brushing or furbishing indoors, during those first few months, her fingers were busy with little garments—shirts and gowns and overalls—cut from her own clothes of homespun tweed and unbleached calico.

It was at the end of a long golden day that a cry from her brought Donald from the far edge of the clearing. He was turning the land for his first crop, and when he heard that cry, left the mare in her tracks, the rope lines trailing beside her.

Later, his hands trembling, he took Lassie from the plough, and led her to the creek for water. Then, although the sun had not set, he hobbled her for the night, went into the house and shut the door.

Usually, all was silent within its walls when the darkness fell; but this night a garish light flickered under the door. There were sounds of hushed movement, faint moaning, the crackling of fire on the hearth, all night. The dog lying on the mat by the door did not know what to make of it. He growled, low and warningly now and then. Towards morning while stars still sparkled over the dark wave of the forest, a faintly wailing cry came from the hut. The dog's ears twitched; his yelping had an eerie note.

Sunlight was flooding the hills, illumining the forest greenery, making crimson and gold of the shoots on the saplings, banishing the mists among the trees, splashing in long shafts on the sward, wet with dew, when Donald Cameron opened the door. His arms were folded round a shawled bundle. He stood for a moment in the doorway, the sunlight beating past him into the hut.

Then he lifted the small body in his arms, kissed it, and held it out to the dawn, his face wrung with emotion.

"All this, yours—your world, my son!" he said.

They were quiet days that followed, days spun off in lengths of sunshine from the looms of Time, with the sleepy warmth of the end of the summer and the musky odours of the forest in them. Mary worked less out of doors when she was about again; her hands were full, cooking, washing and sewing, and looking after the animals and the baby. She sang to him as she worked. All her joy and tenderness were centred in him now.

Donald did not understand the love songs she sang to little Davey. They were always in her own Welsh tongue.

"It's queer talk to make to a bairn," he said one day, smiling grimly, as he listened to her.

"He understands it, I'm sure," she said, smiling too.

Cameron sang himself sometimes when he was at the far end of the clearing. It was always the same thing—the gathering song of the Clan of Donald the Black. While he was ploughing one morning, Mary first heard him singing:

Pibroch o' Donuil Dhu,
Pibroch o' Donuil,
Wake thy wild voice anew,
Summon Clan Conuil.

The words of the grand old slogan echoed among the hills.

When next she heard it, Mary lifted Davey out of his cradle and ran to the door with him, crying happily:

"Listen, now, Davey dear, to thy father singing!"

Cameron had interrupted himself to call to the mare as she turned a furrow: "Whoa, Lass! Whoa now!"

He had gone on with his song as he bent the share to the slope of the hill again.

A hidden root checked his progress; but when he had got it out of the way, and the plough settled again, he swung down hill, giving his voice to the wind heartily:

Leave untended the herd,
The flock without shelter;
Leave the corpse uninterred,
The bride at the altar.
Leave the deer, leave the steer,
Leave nets and barges;
Come in your fighting gear,
Broad swords and t—a—r—ges.

His voice had not much music, but Mary loved the way he sang, with the fierceness and burr, the rumble on the last word, of a chieftain calling his men to battle. It was almost as if he were calling his tribesmen to help him in the battle he had on hand. But he was as shamefaced as a schoolboy about his singing, and it was only when he was some distance from the house, and had forgotten himself in his work, that he gave expression to the deep-seated joy and satisfaction with life that were in him.

Davey was four months old, and the paddock his father had been ploughing the day he was born was green with the blades of its first crop, when Mary asked:

"When will you be going back to the Port, Donald?"

She had taken Cameron's tea to him where he was working among the trees a little way from the clearing. He was resting for a few minutes, sitting on a log with his axe beside him.

She spoke quietly as if it were an ordinary enough question she had asked. Her eyes sought his.

"There's very little flour left, and only a small piece of corned meat."

"I'd made up my mind to go, day after to-morrow," he said.

CHAPTER III

This journey to Port Southern for stores meant that Mary would have to remain alone in the hills until her husband returned. The cow and calf had to be fed and looked after. They were valuable possessions, and could not be left for fear they might wander away from the clearing and get lost in the scrub. Besides, there were the fowls to feed, and the crop to guard from the shy, bright-eyed, wild creatures, that already, lopping out of the forest at dawn, had nibbled it down in places.

Cameron's eyes lingered on his wife as he answered her question. She stood bareheaded before him, the afternoon sunlight outlining her figure and setting threads of gold in her hair. The coming of the child had made her vaguely dearer to him. This journey had not been mentioned between them since Davey's birth. He had tried to put off making it, ekeing out their dwindling supply of corned meat by shooting the brown wallabys which came out of the trees on the edge of the clearing, surprised at the sight of strange, two-legged and four-legged creatures.

They, and the little grey furry animals that scurried high on the branches of the trees on moonlight nights, made very good food. Donald Cameron had been told that no man need starve in the hills while he had a gun, and there were 'possums in the trees. But neither he nor Mary liked the strong flavour of 'possum flesh, tasting as it did, of the pungent eucalyptus buds and leaves the little creatures lived on. He shot the 'possums for the sake of their skins though, spread and tacked the grey pelts against the wall of the house, and when the sun had dried them, Mary stitched them into a rug. She had lined Davey's cradle with them, too.

Donald made ready for his journey next day. During the morning he took his gun down from the shelf above the door, cleaned it, and called his wife out of doors. He showed her how to use it and made her take aim at a tall tree at the end of the clearing.

"You must have no fires or light in the place after sundown," he said, "and let the grub fires in the stumps die out. Bar the doors at night. And if blacks, or a white man sets foot in the hut y've the gun. And must use it! Don't hesitate. It's the law in this country—self-defence. Every man for himself and a woman is doubly justified. You understand."

"Yes, of course," she answered.

"And I'll leave you the dog," he went on. "He's a good watch and'll give warning if there's any danger about."

"Yes," she said.

When the morning came she went to the track in the wagon with him, carrying Davey. She got down when they reached the track; he kissed her and the child, and turned his back on them silently.

She stood watching the wagon go along the path they had come by from the Port, until its roof dipped out of sight over the crest of the hill; then she went slowly back along the threadlike path among the trees.

A white-winged bird flapped across her path; already fear of the stillness was upon her. When she reached the break in the trees and the clearing was visible, the hut on the brow of the hill had an alien aspect. The air was empty without the sound of Donald's axe clanging in the distance, or of his voice calling Lassie.

She was glad when Davey began to cry fretfully. But she could not sing to him. She tried, and her voice wavered and broke. Every other murmur in the stillness was subdued to listen to it.

The day seemed endless. At last night came. She closed and barred the door of the hut at sunset, glancing towards the shelf where Donald had put his gun. The firelight flickered and gleamed on its polished barrel.

Kneeling by the hearth she tried to pray. But her thoughts were flying in an incoherent flight like scattered birds. Davey slept peacefully on the bed among the grey 'possum furs she had wrapped round him. She watched him sleeping for awhile, and then undressing noiselessly, lay down beside him.

She did not sleep, but lay listening to every sound. The creak of the wood of the house, the panting of the wind about it, far-away sounds among the trees, the shrill cry of a night creature, every stir and rustle, until the pale light of early dawn crept under the door, and she knew that it was day again.

While she was busy in the morning she was unconscious of the world about her, or the flight of the day, but when her work was done and she stood in the doorway at noon, the silence struck her again.

All the long day there was a faint busy hum of insects in the air. It came from the grass, from the trees—the long tasselled branches of downy honey-sweet, white blossoms that hung from them. Yet this ceaseless chirring of insects, the leafy murmuring of the trees, twittering of birds in the brushwood, the murmuring of the wind in distant valleys, the intermittent crooning and drone of the creek—all the faint, sweet, earth voices dropped into the great quiet that brooded over the place as they might have into a mysterious ocean that absorbed and obliterated all sounds. The bright hours were rent by the momentary screeching and chatter of parroquets, as they flew, spreading the red, green and yellow of their breasts against the blue sky. At sunset and dawn there were merry melodious flutings, long, sweet, mating-calls, carollings and bursts of husky, gnomish laughter. Yet the silence remained, hovering and swallowing insatiably every sound.

She gazed at the wilderness of the trees about her. From the hill on which the cow paddock was she could see only the clearing and trees—trees standing in a green and undulating sea in every direction, clothing the hills so that they seemed no more than a dark moss clinging close to their sides. In the distance they took on all the misty shades of grey and blue, or stood purple, steeped in shadows, under a rain cloud. She remembered how she had wondered what their mystery contained for her when she had first seen them on the edge of the plains, and she and Donald had set their faces towards them.

She looked down on the child in her arms, and realised that they had brought him to her; from him, her eyes went to the brown roof of the hut with its back to the hillside, a thread of smoke curling from its brown and grey chimney, and to the stretches of dark, upturned earth before it. They had brought her this too, all the dear homeness of it, and a sense of peace and consolation filled her heart.

To throw off the spell of the silence she decided that she must work again. But what to do? Donald had said no fires were to be lit in the stumps because the smoke might attract wayfarers on the road, or wandering natives to the clearing. She sang to the child, fitfully, softly. Then, remembering the spinning wheel which stood in its muffling cloths against the wall in the hut, she brought it into the sunshine and laid Davey down on a shawl at her feet.

When she had a slender thread of yarn going and the spinning wheel began its familiar, communicative little click-clatter, her mind was set to old themes. She forgot place and time as her fingers pursued their familiar track. A gay little air went fluttering moth-wise over her lips to the accompaniment of the wheel, and the little tap tapping of its treadles. She glanced at the child every now and then, laughing and telling him that his mother had found the wherewithal to keep her busy and gay, as a bonny baby's mother ought to be, and that the song she was singing was a song that the women sang over their spinning wheels in the dear country that she had come from, far across the sea.

But the shadows fell quickly. The birds were calling, long and warningly, when she carried the wheel indoors, and busied herself for the evening milking.

Wherever she went the dog that had come from the Port with them, followed. He trailed in her footsteps when she went to the creek for water, or to the cow paddock. He lay with watchful eyes on the edge of the clearing, when she sat at her spinning in the afternoon, or walked backwards and forwards crooning Davey to sleep.

At about noon on the fourth day while she was making porridge for her midday meal, the dog started to his feet and barked furiously. He had been lying stretched on the mat in the doorway. For a moment her heart stood still. Then she went to the door.

"What is it, Jo?" she asked.

The dog's eyes were fixed on the trees and scrubby undergrowth to the left of the hut. Every short hair on his lean body bristled. He growled sullenly. Later in the afternoon, when she sat in the clearing spinning and singing with Davey on his shawl beside her, he started to his feet suddenly and snarled fiercely.

Mary looked at him again questioningly and her eyes flew to the edge of the trees in the direction he pointed. No quivering leaf nor threatening sound stirred the quiet. He subsided at her feet after a moment, but his ears, kept pricked, twitched uneasily; his eyes never left the edge of the trees. Once they twisted up to her and she read in them the clear expression of a pitiful uneasiness, the assurance of deathless fidelity, a prayer almost to go into the house.

She picked up the child and walked towards the hut. The dog followed, glancing uneasily towards the edge of the clearing. She shut the door on that side of the hut and went to the back door.

"Jo! Jo!" she called long and clearly.

He flew round to her.

Though her limbs trembled, Mary went up to the paddock and brought the cow down to the shed. She milked, with Davey on her knees and the dog crouched beside her; then, with the child on one arm and the milk pail on the other, she went towards the house again.

She did not go down to the creek for water as she usually did.

"It's not because I'm afraid, Davey," she murmured, "but Jo would not have barked like that for nothing. It was a warning, and it would not be nice of us to take no notice of him at all."

As she left the shed the dog darted savagely away. She did not notice that he was no longer at her heels until she had re-entered the hut. As she was going to call him, the words died on her lips. Two gaunt and ragged men stood in the doorway!

CHAPTER IV

Mary stood back from the threshold. The fear that had haunted her for days had suddenly left her.

At first glance she had seen that the men had rough pieces of wood in their hands. Her gaze was arrested by the taller, shaggier man who had sprung forward. He was about to speak roughly, breathlessly; but she anticipated him. Her eyes flew past him to the man who hung in his shadow. The gash of a wound was just visible under a grimy piece of rag wrapped across his forehead.

"He's hurt!" she cried, a sure instinct of protection urging her. "Come in, and I'll bind up your head. It wants water and a clean bandage. Oh, but you look starving, both of you! Have you lost your way in the hills? It's terrible to do that! But you're welcome indeed. Come in and have something to eat and rest yourselves."

The tall man hung in the doorway as though speech and reason had deserted him. But the other, whose thatch of reddish hair stood up strangely from the filthy rag that bound his forehead, raised his arm and took a step forward, the glare of madness in his eyes. But that movement was the last spurt of energy in him. He pitched forward and lay across the threshold.

"Oh, bring him in and put him on the bed there, and I'll try and do something for him," Mary cried, her eyes flying from the fallen body to the man who stood in the doorway.

He did as she asked and turned to her with watchful eyes.

"You hold the child for me while I bathe his head," she said, "it may bring him to."

She thrust Davey into his arms.

"Sit down, won't you?" she asked, smiling towards him, as she set some water on the fire and poured some more into a basin.

She tore up a piece of old linen and began very gently to bathe the unconscious man's head. He groaned as the pain stirred again. She spoke to him, saying that the wound would mend the sooner for being cleansed, and that it was a wonder he was alive at all with the state it was in. Sitting in Donald's chair, holding Davey in his arms, tightly, clumsily, the tall man watched her; his face turned to, and from her, as his eyes wandered apprehensively about the hut, and to the door.

"Here, ma'am," he said at last, snarling over the words, "Where's your man? I've no notion for him to come in and corner us if that's your game."

"He's away," she replied, "and will not be back—perhaps for a day or two."

He stared at her.

"I should never have thought Davey would be so good with a stranger," she added, her eyes travelling from Davey's round head on his arm to the man's dark face, and the eyes that leapt and glittered in it. She smiled into them.

Davey was crooning and gurgling. He had crooked his little hands into the stranger's beard, and his mother saw with joy that the stranger held his head as though he feared to dislodge those little hands.

"No games, ma'am," he growled, "or it'll be the worse for you. We're desperate men. It's our lives we're fighting for."

"I knew that when I saw you," she said quietly.

She put some bread on the table, a mug of milk and a piece of cold meat.

"It is not much to offer you, but it is all I've got," she said. "I wish it were better, because you're wanting good wholesome food just now. I'll make some gruel for your friend and maybe there'll be an egg to-morrow, or I can set snares for a 'possum."

She took Davey from him and he turned to the table to eat. The man on the bed moaned wearily. She put Davey into his basket, lined with furry skins, and went to the sick man. The cloths that she had put over it to soak off the filthy rag which bound his head had served their purpose. She lifted them and the festering gash on his forehead was laid bare.

Her exclamation, or a twinge of pain as the air touched the wound, sharpened his brain. His eyes opened. He stared with semi-conscious gaze a moment. Then with a hoarse oath he sprang at her. His quivering lean fingers gripped her throat and clung tenaciously. The man at the table flung himself upon him and wrenched his hands away; they struggled for a moment, then the sick man dropped on to the bed again; but he shouted incoherently, his fever-bright eyes baleful by the flickering firelight.

"After the gaols, 'n the sea, 'n the bush, to be taken now and like this, by God—" he panted. "Let me be! Let me be, don't you see it's a trap!"

"It's all right," the other gasped. "Don't let your tongue run away with you, Steve."

"I'll not be taken alive," the man on the bed cried. "Not now, not after getting through so far, I'll not be taken alive, 'n the one that tries to take me'll not live either."

The tall man cursed beneath his breath.

"The woman means no harm to you," he said.

"It is the fever troubling him," Mary explained.

The sick man was already weak again. He lay on the bed limply and muttering uneasily.

"You'd best hold him so as I can put on the clean rags," she said.

She had a length of old linen, smeared with ointment from a small earthenware jar, in her hands. She laid it over the wound and gently and firmly bound it into place.

"That'll be better," she murmured.

The gaunt man overlooked her, a curious cynical humour in his eyes.

"You're a brave woman," he said.

"I'm not, indeed," she replied; but her eyes met his squarely.

She laughed softly, and told him how afraid she had been earlier in the day.

At the sound of his mother's voice, Davey piped, wistfully. She went over to him and rocked his cradle for a moment or two.

"Hush, Davey," she said talking to him softly in her native Welsh. "We have company. There's one hungry man wants his supper, and another man, sick, that thy mother must make gruel for. Do thou sing to thyself, son, till mother is ready to take thee again."

But Davey had no great notion of the laws of hospitality that separated him from the source of all consolation. He wailed incontinently and from wailing took to uttering his protest with all the strength that was in him.

The unkempt stranger munching his dry bread by the table, glanced furtively at Mary's back as she stooped over the fire stirring the gruel; then he got up and went to the cradle. He lifted the child with awkward carefulness. Davey continued to wail, nevertheless, finding that it was not the soft covering of his mother's breast that he was laid against, but a harsh fabric, smelling of the sea, the earth, dank leaves and a strange personality.

When she took the gruel from the fire and poured it into a little bowl, her eyes rested on the stranger as he tried to appease Davey.

He was cradling the child in his arms, and muttering awkwardly, distressfully: "There now! There!" An expression of awe and reflectiveness veiled the sharpness of his features. "There now! There then!" he kept saying.

He looked up to find Davey's mother's eyes resting on him and laughed a little shamefacedly.

"I think he's forgetting his company manners, surely," he said.

"You're the first company he's had to practise on," she replied.

Her simplicity, and again the clear, shining eyes with their direct and smiling glance astounded him.

"You'd best give this to your friend, yourself," she went on, putting the bowl on the table. "It seems to trouble him to see a strange face."

She lifted Davey from the stranger's arms and he took the bowl of gruel to the other man.

"Be gentle with him and humour him," she warned, "but make him eat all of it. I'll put a blanket here on the hearth for you, and Davey and I will sleep at the other end of the room."

When she had thrown all the spare clothing in the hut on the floor before the fire and had spread a patchwork quilt and the rug of 'possum skins at the far end of the room for herself, she sat down on a low stool near the door and lifted Davey's lips to her breast. She sang a half-whispering lullaby, rocking him in her arms. His cries ceased; her thoughts went off into a dreamy psalm of thanksgiving as his soft mouth pulled at her breast.

She looked up to find the eyes of the tall stranger on her.

A gaunt, long-limbed man, his clothes hung on his arms and legs as if they were the wooden limbs of a scarecrow. The shreds were knotted and tied together, and showed bare, shrunken shanks and shins, burnt and cut about, the dark hair of virility thick on them. His face, lean and leathern, had a curious expression of hunger. The eyes in it held dark memories, yet a glitter of the sun.

Mary Cameron vaguely realised that she had known what manner of man this was the moment she looked into his eyes. That was why she had not been afraid when he confronted her on the doorstep; why, too, she had been able to ask him into her house and treat him as an unexpected, but not unwelcome guest.

The man on the bed moaned. Suddenly he started up with a shrill scream.

"A wave! A wave! We'll be swamped."

His voice fell away, muttering. Then again he was crying:

"Is that the land, Dan, that line against the sky over there? No, don't y' see there—there, man. God! Don't say it isn't! How long have we been in this boat? Seems years ... been seein' the sea, them blasted little blue waves jumpin' up 'n lickin' my face! Better throw me overboard, Dan. Dan? Better throw me overboard ... can't stand it any longer. The thirst and the pain in me head, Dan."

Mary turned pitiful eyes on him, rocking Davey and hushing him gently, as he wakened and began to cry querulously.

"A sail!" the sick man shouted. "Some blasted clipper for the Port, d'y' think she'll see us, Dan? Are we too far away? Will the waves hide us?"

He sank back wearily, muttering again.

"I'll not be caught ... not be taken alive, Dan." He started up crying angrily. "I'd rather go to hell than back. A-u-gh!"

A shriek that curdled the blood in her veins, a cry that sped upwards in an uncurling scream of uncontrollable anguish, flew from the sick man. Another and another.

Mary looked at the man before her questioningly.

The lines about his nose were bent to a faint and bitter smile; but there was no smile in his eyes.

"Thinks he's being flogged," he said. "He would be if we were caught—taken back again. You know where we came from?"

"Yes," she said.

"From the Island," his head was jerked in the direction of the sea. "You're the first soul I've spoken to since we escaped except him, and he's been raving mad most of the time. You and I've got to do some talking, ma'am."

He looked about the room, lifted Donald's chair and set it before her. He had recovered his self-possession, was readjusting his plans.

"Yes?" she said.

"You know, we meant to get all the food and clothes we wanted from this hut," he said harshly. "We watched you all day from the trees and thought a man would be coming home after sundown. We didn't mean to let you off if you screamed and brought him before we'd got what we wanted.... The dog's dead. Did you know? I killed him, caught him by the throat behind the shed?"

"But that was a pity!" she cried, a note of distress in her voice.

"Pity?" He leaned forward. "But we can't afford to have pity. I saw you sitting spinning in the sun, singing to the child. My heart turned in me to see you like the women at home. But that would not have saved you. Starving men, fighting for our lives we were. Wild beasts. Pity? What pity's been shown to us? Do y' know what it means to have felt the lash, and made your escape from Port Arthur, swimming the bay at Eaglehawks' Neck, wrapped in kelp, cheating the bloodhounds chained a few yards from each other across the Neck, and the sentry who'd shoot you like a dog if he saw you? Do y' know what it was like, crawling from one end of the Island to the other in the bush at night with only a native to guide you ... not knowing whether he was going to spear you, or run you into the tribe ... making your way in a cockle-shell of a boat in the open sea without any mariner's tools at all, and only a keg of water and a bit of 'possum skin to chew to keep the life in you?

"No, you don't know! How could you?" He paused a moment, and continued desperately: "And it's no good my trying to tell you; Steve got a crack on his head the night we escaped. He was mad with thirst in the boat. I was near it myself ... and I had all the work to do, pulling and straining my eyes for the land. We had to keep out of sight of other boats too, and the Government sloop going between Port Southern and Hobart Town, for fear we'd be seen, picked up and sent back. Months of scheming it took to get so far! I'd picked up the lay of the land near the Port and the way to get about in the country beyond, from sailors. It was a man who'd got as far as the coast and had been sent back told me to look for the muddy river-water in the sea and get up the river at night. We wanted to make the Wirree because there is a man—lives near the river—we'd heard would give us food and shelter, or help us to get away to the hills.

"We got to the river and had to be low in the bush all day till night came again. Then I went up through the trees to a wooden house we could see among other houses that were all mud, or mud and stones. It was McNab's shanty. We'd got a sailor to take a letter through to him, saying we were coming and to be on the look out for us. And I'd got a message from McNab telling us how to get to him, what sort of man he was to look at, and saying he was willing to help us get away on condition that when we got on our feet we'd make it up to him—of course we had to pay on the spot too. And we'd got a bit to do it with. I've heard them say on the Island he's making his fortune, McNab....

"They say there are men in this country now—well off, holding big positions—who pay McNab what he likes because he helped them to get away. They pay because if they don't—no matter who they are, what they're doing—a word from him against them, and back they'd go to the darbies and the cells. But there's a new game now. A reward is out for the capture of escaped convicts."

The weary bitterness of his voice took a sharper edge.

"It was a hot night; I lay low near McNab's, waiting for the chance to tell him we'd come and get the food and clothes he'd promised to have ready for us. It was late.... I waited until there didn't seem anybody about the bar and the lights went out—all but the one in a room at the side. Then I got tired of waiting and crept up to the shanty and lay flat against the wall, hoping to see if the way was clear and I could get a word with McNab.... The wall was not thick, and there was a crack in it. I could see into that room with the light. McNab was there, and the trooper from Port Southern with him. Under his coat, I could make out his uniform. A bottle of rum made the talk go easy between them, and I heard the plan they were making. It was that M'Laughlin should not keep too close a watch for 'travellers' from the Island—be too keen on their scent—and McNab should play friendly to them and tell M'Laughlin of their whereabouts when they thought they were getting off finely. He was to arrest them, and the pair of them would share the reward. Steve and I were expected. We were to be first victims."

Mary's exclamation of pity and horror comforted him. The compassion of her eyes banished the evil, mirthless smile from his.

"I got back to Steve," he said more quietly. "He was almost too ill to walk. He understood though that we would not be troubling McNab, when I told him what had happened, and was quiet—though he had been moaning and crying all day. It was because of his fever I was afraid to leave him again, or to try to get food in the township. So we started for the ranges. But we hadn't gone far when he gave out and I had to carry him. I wanted to get him away from the tracks where the sound of his raving could be heard, and so we've been in the hills ever since—nearly ten days it must be. This was the first clearing we sighted since we saw the Wirree and we had to get what we could out of it, or die in our tracks. I'm talking sane enough now, but I was almost as mad as Steve—with hunger and rage at the thought of being taken again and serving to get reward money for McNab, when we came to the door, here...."

He hesitated.

"It was the sight of you ... looking like the Mother of God with the child in your arms ... saved me."

"I'll give you all the food and clothes I can," she said.

"Ma'am "—his voice trembled. Then he said roughly: "You're not playing the Thad McNab game?"

Her eyes met his.

"Do you think so?" she asked. "Davey and I, a fine pair we are to play a game with you."

"You think it's the easiest way to get rid of us—to give us what we ask for?"

She nodded, smiling.

"You are afraid, then?"

"Not for myself—but for you."

There was no wavering in her eyes. "I was not wanting my husband to find you here. He might think it was his duty to send word back to the Port. He might...."

"He'd try."

"Yes, he'd try. But you've got a sick man to think of and you're at the end of your strength yourself. Donald's a strong man, and he has no love for desperate characters." A flickering smile played about her mouth. "You must be gone before he returns. You can rest here to-morrow and then you would be better going. You can read the stick by the door. The cross marks the day he went, it will be five days since then to-morrow, and he may be back on the sixth, or the seventh day."

The man looked from her to the sapling pole by the door, counted the notches on it and his eyes returned to her.

"You've heard naught good of convicts that you should be treating me so," he said.

"No, it's terrible tales, I've heard of the things they do, and the things that are done to them."

A shadow had fallen on her face.

"None too terrible for the truth," he said.

"They tell me—it was a man in Melbourne told me—it is the life makes them desperate," she cried. "Men who have been sent out for quite little things, become—"

"Dead to shame," he said, "men who would kill a woman who has served them as you have served us, for fear when they'd gone she would betray them—send her men and the black bloodhounds after them, condemn them to hell and torture again. Oh, women have done it, and men like me have made other women pay."

A gleam of anger lighted Mary Cameron's eyes.

"If you believe I would give them the chance of taking you back again there is Donald's gun on the shelf," she said. "Settle the matter for yourself. But if you will believe the truth it is this: My heart is with you and all like you."

The sick man muttered and cried; Davey waking, wailed fretfully.

"We'll go to-morrow," the stranger said. "You'll give us food and clothing?"

"Yes," she replied a little wearily. "But will you not rest now? I must be sleeping myself because the child will be ill if I'm not careful of him."

The man stood before her abashed, his face working as though he were restraining the desire to cry as Davey was crying.

"I can't understand why you should be as you are," he said at length, his voice breaking.

"Ah, there's reason enough," she sighed, and turned away from him.

He threw himself down before the fire. But Mary did not sleep when she lay on the floor at the other end of the room, although the regular breathing of her guest told her when he slept. Once she sat up and looked at him where he lay stretched before the fire as he had thrown himself in an attitude of utter exhaustion. The rambling cries, and the moaning of the man on the bed, kept her awake. She found herself listening to the tangled threads of his raving. The firelight leapt in long beams across the room. There was no fear but a strange awe in her heart.

CHAPTER V

In the morning the tall man's eyes followed Mary as she went about the work of her house.

As though he were dreaming, he watched her break dry branches and sticks for the fire across her knee. Then it occurred to him to offer to break them for her, and he fetched an armful of wood from the stack in the yard. He gazed as if it were strange and wonderful to see a woman washing dishes, sweeping, and cooking at her own hearth. He saw her leg-rope and bail the cow, lead the cow and calf to the fenced paddock on the top of the hill after the milking, and carry buckets of water from the creek to the house, the sunlight touching her bare head and flashing from the water in her pails.

Mary did everything in a serene, methodical way, going from one task to another as though she were happy in each, and in no hurry to be done with it. He heard her calling to the fowls as she threw a handful of crumbs to them; and, seeing that he was watching, she told him, smiling a little, that the matronly, buff hen. Mother Bunch, was a very good hen indeed, laying every day, except Sunday, in the summer and spring time; and that the smart, speckled-backed pullet was no good at all for laying.

"She gives us a little brown egg now and then," Mary said, "and makes such a fuss about it! That's why I call her Fanny. She is so like Miss Fanny at home who could not sew at all well, but when she made a dress that a woman could wear all the countryside knew about it. He"—she indicated the lordly rooster—"is called the Meester—that is the Master in English."

A smile showed in the man's sombre eyes.

Early in the morning she had given him a bowl of porridge and had eaten some herself. A bowl containing porridge for Steve when he wakened was set by the hearth.

The house was in order, Davey bathed, and put in his basket in the sun, and Mary was making bread of the little flour and meal left in the bags, when Steve awoke.

He sat up on the bed and looked uneasily about the room. He was a frail, sickly-looking creature. The fever had left him, but there were apprehension and desperate fear in his eyes, as with a quickened light they rested on her.

"He's awake!" Mary called softly to the man out of doors.

He sprang across the threshold.

"It's all right, Steve," he said. "This woman's a friend."

She had stooped to the hearth and lifted the bowl of porridge.

Steve ate like a hungry dog, tearing at the bread, and thrusting large spoonfuls of porridge into his mouth. Mary gave him a cup of hot milk. He swallowed it at once, and coughed and swore as it scalded his throat.

"If you could see what you can do for us in the way of clothes, ma'am," his companion said, "we'll be moving on."

Her eyes were troubled.

"If harm came of my helping you," she began, "if—"

"Innocent blood were shed," he said.

There was bitterness in his voice.

"You're like the rest of them. Good, bad or indifferent, you herd us all together—convicts. If you mean," his eyes sought hers, "if you mean you're afraid that instead of helping to give a man another chance for his life you may be helping a wolf to harry the lambs, you're making a mistake, ma'am. I swear by all I hold sacred, you'll not repent of what you have done for me."

Mary smiled, her tension of spirit relieved.

"I believe you," she said simply.

She took Donald's working clothes from the pegs where they hung behind the door. They were worn, but whole. From the heavy sea-chest that stood in the far corner of the room she took a grey flannel shirt, also one of unbleached calico, and a pair of dingy black trousers; then she brought a pair of broken boots and a torn felt hat from the shed where the plough and tools were kept.

"There's only one hat, and I'll have to stitch it for you," she said, "but he"—with a glance at Steve who had fallen asleep again on the bed—"he won't have need of a hat for awhile with that bandage on his head, and when the cut is healed, you had better give him this one to wear, and you will be able to say you have lost yours."

The tall man glanced from Donald's heavy boots to Steve's bruised and blackened feet.

"You had better put on those yourself," Mary said, following his glance, "perhaps he could wear mine."

She sat down and took off her shoes.

While he measured her shoe against Steve's foot, she slipped her feet into a broken pair of green-hide covers clamped with nails that Donald had made.

"They will be right for him," he said. "I'll waken him now and we'll get on our way."

She took the bread that had been browning on the hearth stones and put it on the table. The hut was filled with the warm, sweet smell of the newly-baked loaves.

"You can change in here while I put Davey to sleep outside," she said. "And there's a pail of water and soap there by the doorway; it will do you no harm to dowse with it."

The tall man laughed. It was a boyish burst, that laugh of his. The piece of advice, womanly in its essence, and delivered with an air of maternal solicitude, touched a forgotten well-spring of merriment.

Mary lifted Davey into her arms, and sang to him softly as she walked up and down in the sunshine.

A long, straggling figure came to her a few moments later, clad in Donald's clothes. She smiled to see the way they hung short of his ankles, hitched over the long, thin legs. But the dowsing of creek water had done more than cleanse his body; in an indefinable way it had purified and stimulated the inner man. He had found Donald's shears, too, and had clipped the shaggy growth about his chin to a modest beard, and shorn his head of some of its shock of hair.

"You have the air of a daffy young Englishman just arrived in the Colonies to make your fortune," she said.

"Ma'am, isn't that what I am?"

There was a blithe recklessness in his voice. He swept her the bow that was considered gallant in the old country.

Steve appeared in the doorway.

"Are you going now?" she asked.

He nodded.

"But I must give you some bread and milk to take with you," she said. "It will be a long time before you strike Middleton's. It was there I was thinking you might make for at first. It's across the ranges to the east. If you follow the track across the clearing, you will find a stock route. You've only to keep along that and it will bring you to the station. It's four or five days' journey from here, I think, and maybe there'll be a job with cattle there. Drovers are being wanted everywhere—they were when we came up from the Port nearly a year ago."

"Yes," he said, "we heard in the Island that every man in the country's wanting to be gold-hunting, and that the cattle-owners can't get beasts to the market. They're running off wild, where the stockmen have left them. We want any job that'll bring food and money to begin with, and they say men with cattle are not making too particular inquiries as to whose doing their drovin' so long as it's done."

She put Davey in his basket, and went back to the hut. When she reappeared, it was with some bread and a bottle of milk wrapped in a piece of bagging.

"You'll have no trouble about water, because there are creeks all through the hills," she said, as she put the bundle into his hand.

Steve had gone off without speaking to her. He was slouching towards the trees.

The tall man took the food from her. Their eyes met.

"Have I ever seen you before? I seem to know you," she asked, distress on her face.

"Pray God not, ma'am," he said.

"What is your name?"

"You'd better not know."

For a moment, in a storm of gratitude and emotion, his mind trembled on the verge of self-revelation. His face worked uncertainly.

"I cannot say what I want to," he said at last, as if restraint denied him almost any expression at all. "This is a debt, ma'am. If ever, in any way, I can repay, I will. But there's no way of letting you know what you have done for me."

For a moment his eyes held hers. Then he turned away, and she watched him stride across the clearing and disappear among the trees.

CHAPTER VI

In her sleep Mary heard the rumble and groan of the wagon as it ground its way along the rough tracks and crashed over the undergrowth. She awakened to hear the yelping of dogs, the lowing of cattle, sounds of men's voices in the clearing. For a moment she believed that her mind was still hovering in the troubled state of dreams. Then Donald's voice calling her struck through the drowsy uncertainty. Trembling, she sprang out of bed and threw Davey's red shawl about her shoulders. She lighted the dip in a bowl of melted fat and put it on to the table.

"Mary!"

Again his voice, hoarse and impatient, came from the darkness on the edge of the clearing.

She pulled back the bolts and threw open the door.

"Yes," she called.

Donald loomed out of the darkness. Across the clearing, by the swinging light of a lantern before the wagon, she dimly saw its white shape, and the moving backs of cattle.

Her arms went out to Donald when he stood before her.

"Where's the dog?" he asked.

"Dead," she said quietly.

From her eyes and her face as she fell back, he learnt that something unusual had happened.

"Then there has been trouble?" he said.

She nodded.

He swept his hat off with a great sigh.

"But you're all right, you and the bairn?"

"Yes."

"When the dog did not fly out as we got near the house I thought something had happened. There are tales in the Port of two men from Hobart Town, escaped convicts, having taken to the hills. Their boat was found in the Wirree. I tried to get back sooner, fearing they might come this way, but the roads were bad and then there were the cattle. I haven't had an easy minute since I've been away. But we can talk later. There's a boy come with me, drivin' the cattle. I got a mob, cheap, from a man whose stockmen had cleared out and left them on his hands. Get us something to eat ready, I'll bring the wagon up to the shed now. You can get what you want from it. There's corned meat and oatmeal and flour for a year. We'll put the cattle into the fenced paddock and then come down. You can clear out the wagon enough to put a sheepskin or two and a blanket in it for Johnson."

He turned away and went back into the night.

Mary threw more wood on the fire. As she put on her skirt and bodice, she heard the wagon labouring, forward.

She was out getting the flour and bacon she wanted from it by the light of a lantern, when, with a rattling of horns and a thunder of hoofs, the cattle beat past her along the track behind the sheds. The lantern light gave a vision of fierce, bloodshot eyes of terror in a sea of tossing backs, of moving flanks, and branching horns. She heard her husband's voice, hoarse and yelling, the voice of the strange youth, and the cracking of whips and yelping of dogs for nearly an hour afterwards as they tried to get the beasts into the fenced paddock on the hill-top.

It was nearly dawn before Donald and the slight, insignificant-looking young man he had brought with him from Port Southern had finished their meal. Then the stockman went to sleep in the wagon, and Donald Cameron turned to his wife.

"Tell me what happened," he said.

She did so very simply.

"They must have been the same men I heard of in the Port," he said, breathing hard. "M'Laughlin, the trooper, told me about them ... and that I had best look out for them up here. There was no telling what they might do, he said—a desperate pair—would stop at nothing. I am not sure that I'd better not send Johnson back to tell him that they've been here and that—"

"You would not do that, Donald?"

"Why not?"

His voice, the suppressed rage of it, was a shock to her.

"A man cannot leave his home in safety with these sort of men about ... and it is the duty of every honest man to deal as he would be dealt by. You're a clever woman, and no harm has come to you by them ... but there are other women who might not be so clever."

"But they were not bad men, Donald; one of them was sick, and the other—"

"It would be a good thing too, being new in the district, to stand well with the police," he continued doggedly, "and if they were here, those two, they would either make back for the Port, or the Wirree, or try to get to Middleton's. If they're on foot, as ye say, they could not go fast, and M'Laughlin with horses could catch them up in a day or two. Which way did they go?"

Mary turned her head away. A sick feeling of grief and disappointment overcame her. His eyes covered the averted curve of her face and the line of her neck.

"Which way did they go?" he asked, thickly.

"Donald," she turned to him. "I promised not to send anyone after them. You know, and I know, that lots of men have been sent out for things that were not crimes at all, and—"

"You know and you will not tell me?" he asked harshly, as though he had not heard.

"Yes," she cried.

He took her by the shoulder. His arm trembled.

"I have stood this sort of thing long enough," he said. "On the ship and in Melbourne it was the same. You were always doing such things, feeding, or giving your clothes to filthy, ailing gaol-birds and whiners. I have told you, you could not afford to do it. No respectable woman can afford to, in a country where every second woman has the prison mark on her. Show sympathy with lags, and what'll be said next? You're a lag yourself and that's why your sympathy's with them. Y're my wife, the wife of a decent man and free settler, I'd have y'r remember that, and I'll not have it said of you!"

He threw her off from him.

"Which way did they go?"

Keen and compelling, the deep-set eyes, those in-dwelling places of his will, met hers.

"It was my word I gave, Donald," his wife said, "and I can't tell you."

CHAPTER VII

In ten years, Cameron's had become the biggest clearing in the hills, as it was the oldest. Many others had been made and were scattered throughout the lower ranges overlooking the Wirree plains, though at great distances apart; ten, twelve and sometimes twenty miles lying between neighbouring homesteads.

The hut that had been Donald and Mary Cameron's first home had been broadened by the addition of several extra rooms. Floors had been put down and a wide verandah spread out from them. Every room had a window with four small glass panes. The window-sills, verandah posts and doors had been painted green, and the whole of the house whitewashed. Its bark roof had given place to a covering of plum-coloured slates; there was even a coin or two of grey and golden lichen on them, and the autumn and spring rains drummed merrily on the iron roof of the verandah. Creepers climbed around the stone chimney and the verandah; clematis showered starry white blossom over the roof and about the verandah post.

A little garden, marked-off from the long green fields of spring wheat by a fence of sharp-toothed palings, was filled with bright flowers—English marigolds, scarlet geraniums, pink, yellow and blue larkspurs—and all manner of sweet-smelling herbs—sage, mint, marjoram and lemon thyme. The narrow, beaten paths that ran from the verandah to the gate and round the house were bordered with rosemary. And in the summer a long line of hollyhocks, pink, white and red, and red and white, waved, tall and straight, at one side of the house. The edge of the forest had been distanced so far on every side of the clearing, except one, that the trunks of the trees showed in dim outlines against it, the misty, drifting leafage swaying over and across them. Only on the side on which the track climbed uphill from the road, the trees still pressed against the paddock railings. A long white gate in the fence where the road stopped bore the name Donald Cameron had given his place—"Ayrmuir." It was the name of the estate he had worked on in Scotland when he was a lad. It gave him no end of satisfaction to realise that he was the master of "Ayrmuir," and that his acres were broader than those of the "Ayrmuir" in the old country; not only broader, but his to do what he liked with—his property, unencumbered by mortgage or entail.

On the cleared hillsides about the house, crops of wheat, barley and rye had been sown. An orchard climbed the slope on the left. Behind the old barn and the stables were a row of haystacks. The cowsheds and milking yards were a little further away. Round the haystacks and about the barn a score of the buff and buttermilk-coloured progeny of Mother Bunch, a few speckled chickens, black and white pullets, and miscellaneous breeds of red-feathered, and long-legged, yellow fowls, scratched and pecked industriously.

Donald Cameron farmed his land in the careful fashion of the Lowland Scots. There was perhaps here and there a crooked line in his fields and a rick awry behind the barns. But all was neatness and order, from the beehives which stood with their pointed straw bonnets beneath the apple trees, to the cowsheds, where newly-cut bracken was laid down every day or two for the cows to stand in when they were milked. There was no filth or squelching morass in his cow-yards. The pigs wandered over the hills rooting under the tender grass. Scarcely a straw was allowed to stray between the back of the house and barns. In the feed-room, the harness-room, in every shed and yard, the meticulous precision and passion for order which characterised all that Donald Cameron did, was maintained.

There were changes indoors as well as out. A long straight kitchen, with a bricked floor and small window looking out on to the yard, had been added to the original home. On the east side, two rooms had been built, and a small limewashed shed behind the kitchen served for a dairy. In it, on broad low shelves against the wall, the rows of milk pans, with milk setting in them, were ranged; a small window in the back wall framed a square of blue sky. When Mrs. Cameron was making butter, the sound of the milk in the churn, the rumble and splash of the curded cream, could be heard in the yard. The sweet smell of the new butter and buttermilk hung about the kitchen door.

Ten years of indefatigable energy, of clearing land, breaking soil, raising crops and rearing cattle, doing battle with the wilderness, overcoming all the hardships and odds that a pioneer has to struggle against, had left their mark on Donald Cameron. Every line in his face was ploughed deep.

His expression, gloomy and taciturn as of old, masked an internal concentration, the bending of all faculties to the one end that occupied him. Always a man of few words, as the farm grew and its operations increased, he became more and more silent, talking only when it was necessary and seldom for the sake of companionship or mere social intercourse. His mind was always busy with the movements of cattle, branding, mustering, breeding, buying and selling prices, possibilities of the market. He worked insatiably.

He was reminded of the flight of time only by the growth of his son—a gawky, long-limbed boy.

As soon as he could walk Davey had taken his share in the work of the homestead, rounding up cows in the early morning, feeding fowls, hunting for eggs in the ripening crops, scaring birds from the ploughed land when seed was in, and cutting ferns for the cowsheds and stables. His father was little more than a dour taskmaster to the boy. Davey had no memory of hearing him sing the gathering song of the Clan of Donald the Black.

His mother had taught him to read and count as she sat with her spinning wheel in the little garden in front of the house, or stitching by the fire indoors on winter evenings. Davey had to sit near her and spell out the words slowly from the Bible or the only other book she had, a shabby little red history. Sometimes when he was tired of reading, or the click and purr of her wheel set her mind wandering, she told him stories of the country over the sea where she was born. Davey knew that the song she sang sometimes when she was spinning was a song a fairy had taught a Welshwoman long ago so that her spinning would go well and quickly. She told him stories of the tylwyth teg—the little brown Welsh fairies. There was one he was never tired of hearing.

"Tell me about the farmer's boy who married the fairy, mother," he would say eagerly.

And she would tell him the story she had heard when she was a child.

"Once upon a time," she would say, "ever so long ago, there was a farmer's boy who minded his father's sheep on a wild, lonely mountain side. Not a mountain side like any we see in this country, Davey dear, but bare and dark, with great rocks on it. And one day, when he was all alone up there, he saw a girl looking at him from round a rock. Her hair was so dark that it seemed part of the rock, and her face was like one of the little flowers that grow on the mountain side. But he knew that it was not a flower's face, because there were eyes in it, bright, dark eyes—and a mouth on it ... a little, red mouth with tiny, white teeth behind it. They played on the mountain together for a long time and sometimes she helped him to drive his sheep. After a while they got so fond of each other that the boy asked her to go home with him to his father's house, and he told his father that he wanted to marry her.

"That night a lot of little men, riding on grey horses, came down from the mountain on a path of moonlight and clattered into the farmyard of the farmer of Ystrad. The smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat ... they all wore red coats, and rode grey horses. Did I say that they all rode grey horses, Davey?"

"Yes, mother," Davey breathed.

She had this irritating little way of going back a word or two on her story if a thread caught on her wheel.

"Well—" she began again, and, as likely as not, her mind taken up with the tangled thread, would add: "Where was I, Davey?"

And Davey, all impatience for her to go on with the story, though he could have almost told it himself, would say: "And the smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat—"

"Oh, yes!" Mary started again: "Strode into the kitchen and pinched the farmer's ear, and said that he was Penelop's father ... the girl's name was Penelop ... and that he would let her marry the farmer's son, and give her a dowry of health, wealth and happiness, on condition that nobody ever touched her with a piece of iron. If anybody put a piece of iron on her. Penelop's father said, she would fly back to the mountain and her own people, and never more sit by her husband's hearth and churn or spin for him. So the farmer's boy married Penelop and very happily they lived together. Everything on the farm prospered because of the fairy wife, though she wore a red petticoat and was like any other woman to look at, only more beautiful, and always busy and merry. She made fine soup and cheese, and her spinning was always good, and everybody was very fond of her. Then one day when her husband wanted to go to a fair, she ran into the fields to help him to catch his pony. And while he was throwing the bridle, the iron struck her arm—and that minute she vanished into the air before his eyes."

She paused for Davey's exclamation of wonderment; and then continued:

"Though he wandered all over the mountain calling her, Penelop never came back to her husband or the two little children she had left with him. But one very cold night in the winter, he wakened out of his sleep to hear her saying outside in the wind and rain:

"Lest my son should find it cold,
Place on him his father's coat.
Lest the fair one find it cold,
Place on her my petticoat."

Mary sang the words to a quaint little air of her own making, while Davey listened, big-eyed and awe-stricken.

"When the children grew up they had dark hair and bright, sparkling eyes like their mother," she would conclude, smiling at him. "And when they had children they were like them, too, so that people who came from the valley where the farmer's boy had married the fairy were always known by their looks, and they were called Pellings, or the children of Penelop, because it was said they had fairy blood in their veins."

Davey had always a thousand questions to ask. He liked to brood over the story; but he learnt more than fairy tales from his mother's memories of the old land. Her mind was beginning to be occupied with thoughts of his future. She and her husband were simple folk. Cameron could barely read and write, and what little knowledge Mary possessed she had already passed on to Davey. She knew what Donald Cameron's ambitions were, and after ten years of life with him had little doubt as to their achievement. The position that it would put Davey in had begun to be a matter of concern to her.

She was turning over in her mind her plans for his getting a good education, as she sat spinning beside the fireplace in the kitchen one evening, when her husband said suddenly:

"I wish to goodness you'd put that clacking thing away—have done with it now!"

"My wheel?" she asked, mild surprise in her eyes.

"Aye," he said impatiently. He was sitting in his chair on the other side of the hearth. "Don't you realise, woman, it's not the thing for Mrs. Cameron of Ayrmuir to be doing. Don't you realise y're a person of importance now. The lady of the countryside, if it comes to that, and for you to sit there, tapping and clacking that thing, is as good as telling everybody y' were a wench had to twist up wool for a living a few years ago."

She stared at him. He shifted his seat uneasily.

"I've been thinking," he continued, "it's no good having made the name and the money unless we live up to it. You must get a girl to help y' with the work of the house, and we'll not sit in here any more in the evening, but in the front room, and have our meals there."

"But the new carpet that's laid down ... and the new furniture, Donald," she exclaimed.

"They're not there to be looked at, are they?" he asked. "Last spring sales they were calling me 'Laird of Ayrmuir.' I cleared near on a thousand pounds.

"I'm not wanting to be flash and throw away money," he added hastily. "But that's to show you, we can, and are going to live, something the way they did at Ayrmuir in the old country."

She rose and lifted the spinning wheel from its place by the fire. It was like putting an old and tried friend from her. But when she sat down on her chair opposite Donald Cameron again there was a new steady light in her eyes.

"You'll be a rich man indeed, Donald, if you go on as you are doing," she said.

"Aye." He gazed before him, smoking thoughtfully.

"And your son will be a rich man after you?"

"Aye."

"Well, you must have him properly educated for the position he is going to have." She came steadily to her point. "All your money won't be any use to him, it will only make him ashamed to go where the money could take him unless he has got the education to hold his own."

Her eyes drew his from their contemplation of the fireplace and the falling embers.

"You've the book learning, why can't you give it to him?" he said.

"I have given him as much as I can," she sighed, "but it's little enough. I'm not such a fine scholar as you think, Donald. There are things in those books that you brought from the Port—in the sale lot with the arm-chair and the fire-irons—that I cannot make head nor tail of, though the fore-bits I've read say that: 'A knowledge of the contents is essential to a liberal education.'"

She pronounced the words slowly and carefully; Donald Cameron frowned. He did not exactly know what she was driving at, but those words sounded important.

"I've been thinking," Mary went on quickly, "there's a good many people about here now, and they ought to be getting their children educated too. There's the Morrisons, Mackays, Rosses and O'Brians. And there's a child at the new shanty on the top of the track, Mrs. Ross was telling me, last time she was here. Between the lot of us we ought to be able to put up a school and get a teacher. A barn on the road would do for a school. In other parts of the country the people are getting up schools. The newspaper you brought from Port Southern last sales said that. Why should not we?"

"And where will you get y'r teacher," Cameron asked grimly.

Her colour rose.

"I know what you mean," she said. "The only sort of men who could and would think it worth while giving school to children are the convicts and ticket-of-leave men; but there are decent men among them. They seem to be doing very well in other places. I see that mothers are going to the school-room and sitting there, doing their sewing, so that they can be sure the children are learning no harm with their lessons. We could not do that every day here, but now and then one of us mothers could go to see that the school was going on well. Anyway, the children must be taught and we've got to make the best bargain we can."

"I'll think of what you say," her husband replied.

"You'll be going to the Clearwater River to-morrow, and be away a day or two, won't you?" she asked. "I might take the cart and Lass and go and see what Mrs. Ross and Martha Morrison and Mrs. Mackay think of getting a school."

"If people about are willing," Donald Cameron said, brooding over his pipe, "it'd be a good thing for all of us—a school. The difficulty I can see will be the teacher. Can we get one? There's high wages for stockmen and drovers. But maybe there'll be just some stranded young fool glad of the job and the chance of makin' a little money without soiling his hands. You could pick them up by the score in Melbourne, but here—"

He shook his head.

"You might ask a few questions in the Port when you're there, if there is any likely young man," she said.

"Aye, I might," he replied. There was an amused gleam in his eyes as he looked up at her. "You seem to have thought a good deal on this matter before using y're tongue."

"Is it not a good way?" she asked, the smile in her eyes, too.

"Aye," he admitted grudgingly, "a very good way. And you do not mean the grass to grow under y're feet, Mary?"

"No, indeed!"

She put her work-basket away, took the lighted candle from the table and went to her room. The loose star of the candle flickered a moment in the gloom and then was extinguished. But Donald Cameron, left alone before the fire, realised that the subject of Davey's schooling had been disposed of.

CHAPTER VIII

It took Mrs. Cameron some time to make her round of visits. But she was very pleased with the result of them. On the afternoon of the third day, she drove in a high spring-cart, up the steep hillside, on the top of which a shanty had been built only a few months before.

It was a stopping place for stockmen and travellers on the overland track, the only one between the scattered settlements on the other side of the ranges and the Wirree River. From the head of the ranges it looked down on the falling slopes of lesser hillsides and on the wide sweep of the inland plains. It was not more than five or six miles from Ayrmuir, but she had made it the last place to visit, thinking that she might not have time to get to it before her husband was due to return from the Clearwater. She had settled in her own mind to make a separate journey some afternoon if she could not include it in this one. But her plans had gone well and briskly.

All the women she had seen thought the school a good idea and were anxious to have it; the men had promised to help in the building, and to pay the share that she had mentioned as likely to be asked of them for the Schoolmaster's services.

Davey had enjoyed the first part of the excursion as much as she had. He had romped and run wild with boys and girls on the homesteads they had been to. It was only when they were leaving Ross's that morning he had been disturbed. After his mother and Mrs. Ross had kissed good-bye, Mrs. Cameron had shaken hands with Ted and Mick Ross and kissed little Jessie, and he had shaken hands with Mrs. Ross and grinned at the boys, Mrs. Ross exclaimed:

"Why Davey hasn't said good-bye to Jess!"

She had lifted the child up to his face. Jess's soft skin against his and her wet baby mouth overwhelmed him with confusion. He brushed his coat sleeve across his cheek.

"Oh Davey!" his mother laughed.

Mrs. Ross laughed too, and Ted and Mick giggled hilariously.

Davey had climbed into the cart and taken his seat by his mother, angry and offended. He had no idea why they were laughing at him; and he sat stolid and sullen, brooding over it all the morning.

When they came to the ramshackle house of grey palings, with a roof of corrugated iron, on the top of the hill, two or three dogs flew out, barking furiously. A bullock-wagon was drawn up on the side of the road, and a lean stock horse, hitched to a post, stood twitching his tail to keep the flies away. Half a dozen scraggy fowls scratched and pecked about the water-butt.

A bare-legged little girl with wind-tossed dark hair ran out and stood staring at them. She had a little white, freckled face, and eyes as shy and bright as a startled wild creature.

Mrs. Cameron got down from the cart, leaving Davey in it holding the reins.

"Good-day," she said to the child. "I want to see Mr. Stevens."

The child stared at her.

Then a man came to the dark doorway of the house, a lean, lithe man, with bearded chin and quick restless eyes.

She went towards him and explained in a few eager words why she had come.

"Will you come in and take a seat, ma'am," he asked, his voice vibrating strangely.

She went into the house; its very shadow exhaled a stale smell of crude spirits and tobacco.

"You'd better give Lass a drink, Davey," she called. "I'll be back presently."

The room she stepped into was kept with an attempt at orderliness. It was bare and cleanly. The dull afternoon sunshine garnished its bare walls, the rough chairs and the bunks against the wall. The man had followed her into the room and now faced her. There was a suspension of the breath in his nostrils as this quiet, grey-clad woman lifted her eyes to his.

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes.

People passed and repassed the room, feet dragged, curious glances strayed into it.

"If you recognise us—give us away—the game's up," he muttered.

"I understand," Mrs. Cameron said.

"Steve made some money on the fields," he said. "He bought this place and Deirdre and I came with him to see him settled. Deirdre—the child you saw outside—belongs to me."

"It's about her I came," Mrs. Cameron explained hurriedly, glad to leave the ground of troubled memory.

She described the scheme for getting a school in the district, building a room somewhere on the roadside, at a point where it could be reached by children of the scattered clearings.

"Who's to be the teacher?" he asked.

Sitting on a low form, he leaned across the table and gazed at her.

Through the open window she could see Davey sitting up very stiff and straight in the spring-cart. He had taken his red history book from his pocket and was pretending to read. The child whom the man before her had called Deirdre was standing staring at him. A smile flitted across Mrs. Cameron's face. She thought that Davey had not forgiven her sex for the discomfiture it had put upon him that morning, and was determined to have nothing to do with little girls.

"That's our difficulty, the teacher," she said. "The only persons who have the education, who are able to be teachers, are—"

"Transports—convicts," he interrupted harshly. "Beg your pardon, ma'am"—his voice dropped contritely as he continued—"You were saying the only persons in the colony who could be school teachers are persons of evil character who could not be depended on not to corrupt the children. What are you going to do then?"

"We thought if we could get a young man with the education, who seemed reformed, we would give him a chance," she said. "For a while the mothers would go to the school and sit there during some of the lesson-times to see—"

"That the children did not learn more than their reading, writing and arithmetic."

"Yes," she smiled. "Do you think you would be willing to let your little girl come to the school if we can get a teacher?"

He flung off his seat and strode restlessly up and down the room.

"She's a wild cat. She wouldn't go unless—"

He threw back his head looking at her, a blithe defiance creeping into his eyes and voice.

"Unless you made me the teacher," he said. "What would you say if I applied for the post?"

"You!"

Her eyes were wide with amazement.

"Oh I thought so!" he laughed. "But your reformed young man would have something of a past too, you know, and it might not be as clean even as mine. It's a pity you won't consider me as a likely person. I've got what you call the 'education.'"

"Have you?" she asked eagerly. "The grammar, geography, all the—the learning that is—'essential to a liberal education'?"

"All that, and letters after my name for it," he said, bitterly. "But I'm an Irishman ... I called myself a patriot—and any stick is good enough to beat a dog with. I don't know exactly what they called my offence—'inciting to revolt,' or 'using seditious language,' perhaps; but I have earned my sentence since I got here. It was that I was doing all the time in New South Wales and the Island—'inciting to revolt' and 'using seditious language' ... but the fire's gone out of me now. I want a quiet life."

In his eyes she read a passionate impatience and weariness.

"If you were willing that I should be the Schoolmaster, the other people would be likely to have me, perhaps," he continued. "They would not know what you know, and I can play the part of the broken-down fool who has lost every penny he had on the fields."

"It does not rest with me, naming the Schoolmaster, of course," she said, a little troubled. "But if the others are willing to have you I shall be glad."

She had a native grace that took for granted in others her own sincerity and purity of motive.

"I am grateful, Mrs. Cameron," he said.

She smiled to think that he knew her name.

"You are—"

"Daniel Farrel," he said.

When they went out of doors Lass was standing deserted, with her nose over the water-butt. There was no sight or sound of Davey or Deirdre. Her father called; and presently she came racing round the corner of the house, hair flying, and eyes bright with mischief and laughter.

Davey followed at a breakneck pace. His collar was twisted and a jagged three-cornered tear showed in his grey trousers. The girl flew to her father. Davey came to a standstill sheepishly, a few yards from his mother.

"What have you been doing, Deirdre?" Farrel asked.

"Showing him the ring-tail 'possum's nest in the tree at the back of the cow-yard," she said eagerly. "He couldn't climb because his trousers were too tight, and I raced him up the hill."

"She's a wild thing—has never had anybody but me to look after her," he said to Mrs. Cameron, the black head under his hand.

"Her mother's dead?" Mrs. Cameron asked gently.

"Yes," he said.

Davey and Mrs. Cameron drove away. Davey craned his neck, looking back along the road several times, and the last time he looked Deirdre was standing alone, an elfish figure outlined against the sunset.

"She can run, mother!" he cried, his eyes alight. "She can run and climb quicker than anybody I ever saw. P'raps—I believe she's a Pelling, mother! She's got the bright eyes and black hair."

"Maybe"—Mary Cameron said, smiling at his eagerness and belief in the old story, "maybe there's fairy blood in her veins."

CHAPTER IX

It was not long before a barn-like building of slatted shingles appeared in a clearing off the road, two or three miles below Steve's. It stood on log foundations, as if on account of its importance, and had a door at one end of its road-facing wall instead of in the middle, as ordinary houses had, and two windows with small square panes of glass stared out on the road.

Drovers and teamsters on the roads, as they passed, halted-up to listen to the children singing, and went on their way with oaths of admiration, throats and eyes aching sometimes at the memories and vivid pictures the sound brought them.

Behind the school was the bark-thatched hut which had been run up for the Schoolmaster to live in. Donald Cameron had given the plot of land for the school and he had promised to sell the Schoolmaster a few acres beside it, if he wanted to make use of his spare time to clear the land, put in a crop, or make a garden. Mr Farrel soon intimated that he did, and came to terms with Donald Cameron.

At first no more than a dozen children went to school. Some walked, others came tumbling into the clearing, two or three a-back of a stolid, jog-trotting, old horse, others arrived packed together in a spring-cart. At the back of the clearing was a fenced paddock into which the horses were turned during school hours.

They were a merry company of young warrigals, these children of the hills, when they poured out of the school doorway, played in the clearing at midday, munching their crusty lunches, or chased in the horses, as a preliminary to scrambling on to them and racing each other helter-skelter down the bush tracks, spreading and straggling in every direction to their homes.

The Schoolmaster governed them all with an easy familiarity. He had an eager, boyish way of talking when he explained a peculiarity of spelling, or grammar, or a story from history—a light reckless humour that made Mrs. Cameron, if she were sitting by the window, sewing, look up uneasily, her serene face disturbed, her eyes mildly reproving. But the children laughed and loved the flippancies. They scratched and scraped the better for being on good terms with the Schoolmaster, although Mrs. Cameron was afraid that they had not a proper respect for him and that he was not dignified enough with them.

She was not the only woman who sat on the seat by the window. Sometimes Mrs. Ross or Mrs. Morrison took a turn there and knitted or stitched as they watched to see that the Schoolmaster's behaviour was all that might be expected. They knew nothing of Mr. Farrel's history or antecedents. As far as they were concerned he was a broken-down Irishman who had come to make his fortune on the goldfields and lost any money he had. That was his story; and that he wanted to live a quiet life for awhile, away from the temptations and risks of the scramble for gold. His manner and air were decorous enough to make them believe it; and after the first few visits of inspection they were satisfied not to make any more. Only Mary Cameron was concerned as to the nature of some of the seeds he was sowing in the minds of the young generation. She had heard him describing the state of Ireland under His Most Gracious Majesty George III. to the older boys and girls, and on another occasion had heard him telling them that the exports of Great Britain were cotton and woollen goods, coal and iron, and convicts to New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land.

"Did you have good lessons to-day, Davey," she asked one evening when her son was poring over his books.

"Not half as good as yesterday, when you were there, mother," he said.

"Why, how was that?" she asked.

"Oh, Mr. Farrel says more things to make us laugh when you're there," he said, going on with his writing, painstakingly. "He made me do sums all this morning, and I'd never have got them right if Deirdre hadn't helped me. He lets her sit next me, now."

When school was out, a day or two later, Mrs. Cameron rose from her seat by the window. She tied her bonnet strings.

The Schoolmaster hummed the tune the children had been singing before they clattered out for the day; it was an old English folk song that he had taught them. As he put away his books and pencils, his eyes wandered towards Mrs. Cameron once or twice. Her back was to him; she was looking out of the window.

He strode over to her. He knew she was displeased. His eyes had the guilty look of awaiting reproof, the glad light of the miscreant who knows that he has done wrong but has enjoyed doing it. He had not admitted to himself even that his reason for talking to make the children laugh and pointing a story from history with a radical or cynical moral, was that her anxiety about the instruction they were getting might not be quite lulled. He did not want her to give up coming to the school and cease to occupy the seat by the window occasionally.

But there was something in her face this afternoon that he had not seen there before.

"It was a pity to talk to the children the way you did to-day," she said simply.

"Facts, Mrs. Cameron!" he cried gaily. "The facts of life presented in an interesting form are far more important to boys and girls than a knowledge of—let us say—geography."

"It was geography, among other things, we asked you to teach them," she replied.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am."

His pride was cut to the quick; he bowed, awkwardly.

"I shan't be coming to the school any more, Mr. Farrel," she said after a few moments. There was an odd mixture of dignity and humility in her bearing.

"We're all grateful to you for what you have done in teaching the children. I knew from the first that you were to be trusted—that no harm would come of your schooling—and Davey has told me that it is only when I am here that you talk as you have done to-day. You know I've been coming for my own learning and not to see that you taught properly. I came often because I wanted to learn, and keep up with Davey ... so that I could help him by-and-by, perhaps."

There was an unmistakable break in her voice.

"It was not very kind ... to laugh at me."

She took the wild flowers from the jar of water on her table by the window, as she always did, and went to the door.

It had been very pleasant for her to sit on the bench under the window, hearing the children sing old country songs, and listening to the Schoolmaster telling them of other parts of the world, of rules of speech and calculation, of the nature of the earth, the heavens, the stars and the sea, of kingdoms, strange peoples, and their histories and occupations. The sunlight had come through the open window; and a breeze, bearing the honey fragrance of the white-gum blossoms fleecing the trees on the edge of the clearing, had fanned her face. She was so sorry to be giving up those days in the school-room that a mist of tears stood in her eyes as she glanced about it. She had felt an innocent, almost childish pleasure in them, and in learning with the children.

"Mrs. Cameron—"

The Schoolmaster sprang after her. The trouble in his face surprised her.

"Don't say that I—that I—that you think I could—"

He was not able to say "laugh at you." But she had gone.

He dropped into her chair by the window and threw his arms across the table.

CHAPTER X

The school had been working for over three years when Mrs. Cameron and the Schoolmaster came to an agreement by which Davey was to have extra lessons after school hours—to learn something of foreign languages, and of the higher mathematics, not to speak of other odds and ends of knowledge that Mr. Farrel might consider part of that "liberal education" she was so anxious he should acquire—and Deirdre was to stay with Mrs. Cameron for a while, and learn to cook and sew, and, generally, to practise woman's ways about a house.

It was bareback on Lass, that Davey and Deirdre came jogging along the road from school for the first time.

Mrs. Cameron heard their shrill, joyous voices long before they emerged from the cover of the trees; then she watched them climbing the track across the rise, straddling the old horse's fat sides, Deirdre with her arms round Davey's waist, the red handkerchief containing her wardrobe in his left hand, fast in Lass's matted mane. He gave the old mare a flick, now and again, with a stripped branch he had in his right hand, though it made no more impression than a fly alighting on her thick hair. She kept on at her steady, jogging pace until they were against the yard gate.

Mrs. Cameron laughed when she saw them.

She kissed Deirdre and took the red bundle from Davey's hand.

"Father says," Deirdre said, a quaint air of sedateness settling down on her, "that he's 'shamed to send me without stockings or a wedding garment, Mrs. Cameron. But if you will get what is necessary for me next time you go to the Port he will be—what was it, Davey?"

"Extremely obliged," Davey replied carefully. "Mr. Farrel says that he's bought her shoes and stockings over and over again, mother, but she won't wear them."

"There's two shoes in the 'possum's nest by our house, and a pair of boots in the creek," Deirdre admitted with a sidelong look at him.

While Davey took Lass to the paddock on the top of the hill, Deirdre went indoors with Mrs. Cameron. She had never been away from her father before. At first she had been surprised at the suggestion of going anywhere without him, but he had told her that she was going to learn to be like Mrs. Cameron—a good housewife—so that she could look after him and their home as well as a grown woman; and she was delighted at the idea. Jogging up the hills behind Davey, she had not realised that she was to spend the night away from "Dan," as he was to her in all her tense moments.

It was only when she went into the tiny, box-like, paper-covered room with two little white beds in it that she began to understand this. She gazed at the room, she had never seen anything like it, with its white covers, little cupboard with a mirror on it, and papered walls spread with red and brown flowers.

"You must wash your face and hands, and feet, Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron said, "and then I'll bring you a pair of Davey's shoes and stockings to wear until I can get others for you."

She unknotted the red handkerchief. The two or three little garments of coarse calico it contained had been washed and rough-dried. Mary turned them over critically.

"Dan washed them himself," Deirdre said, sullenly sensing the criticism. "He put them under his bed and slept on them so that they would look nice this morning. He sewed up the holes, too. And he said 'O God!' when he folded them up and put them in the handkerchief."

Mrs. Cameron stared at the clothes, her heart sore for the Schoolmaster and his attempt to send the child to her with all her little belongings neatly mended and in order.

There was silence a moment. Then Deirdre started away from her.

"I don't want to stay here!" she cried.

"Deirdre!" Mrs. Cameron was amazed at the change that had come over the sunny, little face.

"I want Dan! I want to go home," Deirdre cried passionately. "I don't want to stay here. I don't want to be like you! I want—want Dan."

She brushed past Mrs. Cameron and ran out of the house. Mrs. Cameron went after her, calling her, but Deirdre, a light, flying figure, ran on, sobbing; the trees swallowed her.

"Where's the child?" Davey asked, with the easy superiority of his extra years, when he came down from the stables and found his mother standing at the gate, looking down the track Deirdre and he had just come by.

"She's gone, Davey," Mrs. Cameron cried distressfully.

"Gone—where?"

"Home!"

"She went down the track?" he asked.

Mrs. Cameron nodded, tears of disappointment in her eyes. She had been looking forward to having a little girl to teach and look after as though she were her own.

Davey set off at a run.

It was nearly an hour later that he returned, a kicking, struggling, scratching, little creature in his arms. He released his hold of her as he entered the kitchen, threw her from him, and slammed the door behind him.

"There, scratch cat!" he cried fiercely. "Next time you try to run away remember what the Schoolmaster said: 'If you love me, Deirdre, you'll be good to Mrs. Cameron and do what she wants you to!'"

Deirdre had dropped to the floor and was crying, wildly, furiously.

Davey stared at her.

"If you don't stop that howling and yelling at once, I'll ride over and tell him how you're behaving," he said. "And then what'll he say?"

Deirdre's sobbing subsided.

There was a heavy step outside. Donald Cameron opened the kitchen door.

"What's this?" he asked, looking down on the huddled heap on the floor that was Deirdre. He glanced questioningly from his wife to Davey.

"It's the Schoolmaster's little girl!" Mrs. Cameron explained. "She's never been away from him before, and—"

"Well, we can't have this noise in the place," he said irritably.

Deirdre had looked up at the sound of that harsh voice. The sight of Davey's father quelled her.

"Take her away and see that she gets ready for tea, Davey," Mrs. Cameron said anxiously.

Although Deirdre made no more noise, she sat shivering and quivering all the evening, her eyes vacant of all but an inexpressible misery, her thin little body shaken by long, gasping breaths. Mrs. Cameron tried to comfort and console her, talking to her gently and lovingly as she put her to bed, but the child's mind was adamant.

"I want Dan! I want Dan!" she sobbed.

And in the morning when Mrs. Cameron went into her room, the window was open and the little white bed empty.

CHAPTER XI

At school next morning Jessie Ross ran up to Davey, her fair plaits flying.

"I'm to go home with you after school, Davey Cameron," she cried eagerly. "My mother wants your mother to give her the recipe for making cough-mixture out of gum leaves."

"All right," said Davey.

It was a very dismal morning in the school-room. The Schoolmaster's face was dark with displeasure, and it was a very sullen, drooping Deirdre who took her seat beside Davey.

"After school I'm going to drive over to see your mother, Davey," Mr. Farrel said. "I must ask her pardon for what happened last night. I am grieved and ashamed beyond measure that Deirdre—"

His look of reproach went into Deirdre's heart. With a wailing cry she burst into tears again.

Davey, after his first glance at her, kept his eyes on his book; he tried not to see her, or hear her sobbing beside him. His heart was hot against Mr. Farrel. For, after all, it was because she loved the Schoolmaster so much and could not bear to be separated from him that Deirdre was crying like this, he told himself. It was hard that Mr. Farrel should be angry with her as well as everybody else when she had made everybody angry with her on his account.

But the sight of Deirdre's grief was more than the Schoolmaster could bear either. He lifted her out of her seat and carried her off to the far end of the room. He sat there with her on his knee talking to her for awhile. Once Davey glanced in their direction; but he looked away quickly. He had seen tears on the Schoolmaster's lean, swarthy cheeks and Deirdre's face lifted to his with a penitent radiance, and tear-wet eyes, shining. The joy of being folded into his love again had banished the desolation and bleak misery from her face.

When school was out, Jess clambered into the spring-cart Davey had come to school in that day, and perched herself on the high seat.

The Schoolmaster and Deirdre followed them along the road a little later.

Lass went without any flicking with a switch, or mirthful goading of hard young heels that afternoon. Davey brooded over the tragedy of Deirdre's having to become domesticated, and of her love for her father that made it unendurable for her to be away from him even for a night. Since he had forgiven her and they had come to an understanding, she had eyes for nobody else. Her eyes had followed him all the afternoon, still swimming with tears, an adoring light in them. Davey's young male instinct was piqued. He had had no existence for her; yet he had always been her play-mate, and felt for her more than anybody else—even the Schoolmaster, he was sure.

Jess jolted up and down contentedly on the seat beside him. The ends of her little fair pig-tails flipped his arm. She chatted gaily.

"I like you better than any of the other boys at school, Davey," she said with innocent candour. "I think you're the nicest boy, and I'll marry you when I grow up. Mother says you kissed me once when I was quite a little girl. And boys only kiss girls who are their sweethearts, don't they, Davey?"

"No. I don't know," Davey muttered.

Jessie Ross was a fair, tidy-looking little girl, with home-made stockings and black boots on her dangling feet. Her round little face never freckled, nor got sunburnt, though she only wore a hat or bonnet in the summer time. Her skin was prettily coloured and her grey-blue eyes smiled up at him easily.

It pleased Davey to think that she thought he was "the nicest boy." He smiled sheepishly. It was good to think that somebody liked him. He looked round to see how far behind the Schoolmaster and Deirdre were. They were not very far. He saw Deirdre leaning happily against her father, although in her hand—Davey's eyes lighted—was the red bundle.

He clucked and whistled to Lass.

"Gee-up! Gee-up, old Lazybones!" he called cheerily.

Jess chirruped after him:

"Gee-up! Gee-up, old Lazybones!"

"You don't like Deirdre better than me, do you, Davey?" she asked.

"No," said Davey in his newly-won good humour and sore at Deirdre's indifference to his attempts to attract her attention all day.

"The Schoolmaster means she's to stay with us anyway," he thought.

Jess sighed.

"Then if you like me, you can kiss me again, Davey," she said.

"Eh?"

Davey looked scared.

"Well, then, I'll kiss you," Jess said gaily and forth with did.

Davey felt himself grow hot and red.

Jess laughed delightedly.

"Oh you look so funny, Davey!" she cried. "Mick doesn't look like that when I kiss him."

Jess was only a kid, Davey told himself, and because she had brothers and kissed them, thought she could kiss other boys. Yet her gay little peck at his cheek had not displeased him. He wondered whether Deirdre and the Schoolmaster had seen it.

Davey got out of the cart to swing open the long gate. He left it open for the Schoolmaster. Mrs. Cameron came into the yard.

Jess jumped out of the cart and ran to her.

"Mother says, Mrs. Cameron dear," she cried, "would you please give her the recipe for making cough-mixture with gum leaves. And she sends her love and hopes you are well—as she is—and our black cow has a calf, and I found thirteen eggs in a nest in the creek paddock, and Mick killed a snake, five-foot long, under the verandah on Sunday."

Mrs. Cameron smiled and kissed her. Jess snuggled affectionately against her.

"The Schoolmaster's bringing Deirdre," Davey said.

Mrs. Cameron's eyes flew along the track to the other cart that was coming slowly up the hillside.

Davey took charge of the Schoolmaster's horse. Mrs. Cameron and he and the children went indoors.

"I've come to apologise, Mrs. Cameron, for Deirdre's rudeness last night," the Schoolmaster said gravely. "It was very good of you to say that you would teach her what I so much want her to know. I hope that you will forgive her and—"

His voice trembled.

"Deirdre, you've got something to say to Mrs. Cameron yourself, haven't you?"

"I'm sorry!" Deirdre cried, with a dry, breathless gasp.

Her face had whitened; the misery had come into her eyes again. They went appealingly to the Schoolmaster and back to Mrs. Cameron's face.

"Will you—forgive me and teach me to cook and sew and be a good housewife," she sobbed, as if she were repeating a lesson.

"Poor child!"

Mrs. Cameron's compassionate gaze turned from Deirdre to the Schoolmaster.

"Do you really think you ought to?" she asked.

"So help me God, ma'am," he said, struggling with his emotion. "This is the only chance I've got of making a decent woman of her—your influence—if you will use it. I don't want her to be a hoyden always. She must be gentled and tamed, and if you will be as good as to help me—"

He stopped abruptly.

"You will forgive me. Good-day," he said, and went out of the room.

Deirdre made a quick, passionate gesture after him. She did not call him, but a sob broke as she stood staring after him. She ran into the garden to watch the cart with him in it go down the hillside and slip out of sight among the trees; then she threw herself on the grass and sobbed broken-heartedly.

Davey moved to go out to her.

"Leave her alone," his mother said gently, "it's best to let her get over it by herself, Davey."

Jess flew backwards and forwards helping to set the table. She delighted in making herself useful.

"Oh, Mrs. Cameron, what a funny salt-cellar," she cried. "We've got two blue ones and a big new lamp mother got at the Port!"

Mrs. Cameron looked from the tear-stained, grief-torn face of the Schoolmaster's little daughter to the plump, rosy-cheeked, happily-smiling child of her nearest and most prosperous neighbour, and sighed. When the tea was made, she and the children sat round the table for their meal.

Donald Cameron was away and not expected home for a day or two.

Deirdre tried to eat when she was told to, but her lips quivered. She choked over the mouthfuls of food she swallowed. Mrs. Cameron put her arms round her; but Deirdre stiffened against their gentle pressure. She would not be comforted. Davey stared at her miserably.

Only Jess chattered on artlessly, taking no notice of her, eating all her bread and butter, and drinking her milk and water, saying her grace and asking to be excused from the table when she had finished her meal—as though she were demonstrating generally how a nice, well-mannered child ought to behave. She had the other bed in the room in which Deirdre had been put to sleep the night before.

Mrs. Cameron kissed them both good-night.

Jess responded eagerly to her caress. She threw her arms round Mrs. Cameron's neck and rubbed her soft little face against hers, purring affectionately.

"I do love you, Mrs. Cameron, dear," she whispered. "Good-night."

Deirdre submitted to the good-night kiss; she did not respond to it. Of Davey she took no notice when she went to the little room she and Jess were to sleep in. Jess held up her face for him to kiss as Mrs. Cameron had done, but he turned away brusquely, as if he did not see it, and she ran off crying gaily:

"Good-night, Davey Jones,
And sweet sleep rest your bones."

Jess undressed methodically. As she took off each garment she folded it and laid it neatly on the chair beside her bed. When she had on her little night-gown of unbleached calico, she brushed her hair and plaited it again so that it hung in two braids on either side of her face. Then she knelt down by her bedside, folded her hands together, and prayed aloud.

She got into bed and looked at Deirdre across the patchwork quilt, conscious of having performed her whole duty for the day.

"Aren't you sorry you're such a bad, naughty, wicked, little girl?" she asked.

Deirdre's sobs were her only answer.

"God doesn't love you, and I don't, and Mrs. Cameron and Davey don't love you either. Nobody loves bad, wicked, naughty little girls," Jess said solemnly.

She put her head on the pillow and was sleeping, sweetly, peacefully, in a few minutes.

Deirdre crept to the open window. She gazed out of it at the dark heave of the forest that cut her off from the being she loved and the hut in the clearing behind the school. The blue night sky that spread over her was spread over the hut in the clearing and the school too, she knew. They were not many miles away, the hut, the clearing, and the school. From gazing steadily before her and realising that fact, she glanced from the window to the ground. It was such a little distance.

Davey, going to bed in a loft in the barn saw her standing at the window, and watched her, a troubled pain at her suffering gripping his heart.

When she dropped from the window into the garden he was beside her in an instant. He caught her sobbing breath as he touched her.

"You're not going home, Deirdre?" he asked.

"Yes!" she panted, her eyes wide and dark with anguish. "I can't bear it, Davey. I can't breathe."

"He'll be angry," Davey said.

"Yes." She cried and sobbed quietly for a moment. "But I'd rather he'd be angry than send me away from him."

"It'll be morning soon. If you walked you wouldn't be home any earlier than if you waited for us to go to school," Davey said, with rare subtlety. "The Schoolmaster won't be angry if you wait till then, Deirdre, and—" A brilliant inspiration came to him. "I'll bring Lass in an hour earlier and we can start then."

"True, Davey?"

Her eyes questioned him tragically.

"True as death!" he said, and struck his breast three times.

She turned to go back to the bedroom.

"I'm sorry—that sorry, Deirdre," he cried, fumbling for words, and unable to express his sympathy.

She did not turn or look back at him as she clambered in the window; but her face in the morning showed that she understood his championship. She turned to him eagerly when she saw him at breakfast, a subdued gratitude in her eyes. Davey thought that she had at last recognised in him a friend to whom she could turn when everybody's hand was against her.

CHAPTER XII

For months Davey and Deirdre went together along the winding tracks, from the school to Cameron's and from Cameron's to school, sometimes in the spring-cart, but more often on Lass's broad back.

Deirdre had to hang on to Davey when the old horse took it into her head to step out jauntily, but for the most part they rode her lightly enough, Davey with one hand on her mane and Deirdre swinging behind him.

Sometimes Davey dug his heels into her fat sides and put her at a trot that set them bumping up and down like peas in a box, and laughing till the hills echoed. And sometimes in the middle of the fun they found themselves shot on the roadside, as Lass shied and propped, pretending to be startled by a wallaby or a dead tree. These comfortable, middle-aged shies and proppings were regarded as her little joke, her way of indicating that she did not like being dug in the sides. They shrieked with laughter as she stood blinking at them, her white-lashed eyes, on which a chalky whiteness was growing, bland and innocent.

"As if she were so surprised—and hadn't done it all of a purpose," they explained to each other.

Deirdre quickly outgrew the dresses that Mrs. Cameron had first made for her. The Schoolmaster thought that Davey was growing too. Although Lass was up to the weight of the two, and they ran beside her up the hillsides as often as not, and rode her only one at a time as they grew older, with keen eyes for a fair thing where a horse was concerned, the Schoolmaster bought a little wilding of a white-stockinged chestnut for Deirdre to ride. A stockman had traded the colt for a bottle of rum when his mare foaled at Steve's. She was a fine animal with a strain of Arab in her, and when the Schoolmaster had mouthed and gentled White Socks, as Deirdre christened the colt, she straddled him bareback and Davey had his old Lass to himself.

There was nothing for him to do but watch Deirdre as she went off down the track clinging lightly to the little horse whose legs spread out like the wings of a bird. Davey's heart sickened with envy every time Deirdre dashed past him. He urged Lass to the limit of her heavy, clompering gait; but even then she did not keep the chestnut in sight, and all but broke a blood vessel in the attempt. When Davey came up to her, Deirdre was invariably twisted round, waiting for him, brilliant-eyed, a wind-whipped colour in her cheeks, and her hair flying about her.

"You'll break your neck some day, riding like that," he told her, sombrely.

But he was eating his heart out at not having a horse to put against hers, at not being able to send flying the pebbles on the hill tracks as she did. He had asked his father over and over again for a horse of his own, but Donald Cameron would not give him one.

"No, my lad," he said shrewdly. "I'm not going to have you racing horses of mine on these roads with the Schoolmaster's girl—breaking their knees and windin' them. I haven't money to throw away, if the Schoolmaster has. By and by, when you're working with me, you'll have a good steady-going stock horse of y're own—maybe."

Davey's school days were numbered, Mrs. Cameron knew. He was shooting up into a long, straggling youth. His father was talking of breaking him into the work of the place, and Davey was beginning to be restive at school, wanting to do man's work and get a horse of his own.

Deirdre learnt womanly ways about a house quickly enough when she had made up her mind to. Although since the new order of things at Ayrmuir, Mrs. Cameron had Jenny, a big, raw-boned, brown-eyed girl from the Wirree, to help her, and the family had meals in the parlour, and sat on the best shiny, black horse-hair furniture every day, Deirdre made beds, dusted and swept with Mrs. Cameron. She fed the fowls and learnt to cook and sew. Davey had seen her churning, sleeves rolled up from her long, thin arms; he had watched her and his mother working-up shapeless masses of butter in the cool dark of the dairy. When they washed clothes in tubs on the hillside, he carried buckets of water for them and had helped to hang the clean, heavy, wet things on lines between the trees; or to spread them on the grass to sun-bleach. Mrs. Cameron had taught Deirdre to knit, and when her husband was not at home had even taken her spinning wheel from under its covers, set it up in the garden and showed her how to use it. She had sat quite a long time at it, spinning, and delighting in its old friendly purr and clatter.

At such times she would sing softly to herself, Davey and Deirdre crouched on the grass beside her, and, when they begged for them, she would tell some of the fairy tales they loved to hear.

Mrs. Cameron scarcely ever saw the Schoolmaster, and it was rarely then that she spoke to him. Sometimes she discovered him in the background of a gathering of hill folk who met in the school-room on Sundays for hymns, prayers and a reading of the Scriptures, and sometimes she heard him singing in the distance as he rode along the hill roads. Deirdre had sensed a reserve in Mrs. Cameron's manner and attitude towards her father, and could not forgive her for it, though she had a shy, half-grateful affection for her.

Davey was not sure that he liked the Deirdre who had learnt to brush her hair and wear woman's clothes as well as the old Deirdre. There was something more subdued about her; her laughter was rarer, though it had still the catch and ripple of a wild bird's song. She was not quite tamed, however, for all that she did, deftly and quickly though it was done, had a certain wild grace.

It was one evening when she was knitting—making a pair of socks for the Schoolmaster—and muttering to herself; "Knit one, slip one, knit one, two together, slip one," that he realised Deirdre was going a woman's way and that he had to go a man's.

"It'll be moonlight early to-night, and there'll be dozens of 'possums in the white gums near the creek, Deirdre," he said, coming to her eagerly.

The proposition of a 'possum hunt had always been irresistible. Deirdre had loved to crouch in the bushes with him on moonlight nights and watch the little creatures at play on the high branches of trees near the edge of the clearing. They had flung knobby pieces of wood at them, or catapulted them, and were rejoiced beyond measure when a shot told, there was a startled scream among the 'possums and a little grey body tumbled from a bough in the moonlight to the dark earth.

But this night Deirdre shook her head, and went on with her murmuring of: "Knit one, slip one, knit one, two together, slip one."

"No, I can't go 'possuming to-night, Davey," she said. "I want to finish turning this heel."

CHAPTER XIII

The summer of Davey's first year's work with his father was the driest the early settlers had known in the South.

A breathless, insistent heat brooded over the hills, their narrow valleys and the long, bare Wirree plains. The grass stood stiff and straw-like by the roads and in the cleared paddocks, rustling when anything moved in it. Hordes of straw-coloured grasshoppers lay in it, whistling and whispering huskily, or rose with whirring wings when anything disturbed them. The skies, faded to grey, gave no promise of rain, and when the sun set it left a dull, angry flush—the colour of a black snake's belly—behind the hills.

The lesser mountain streams dried up. The creek that ran through Cameron's paddocks became a mere trickle. There was only one deep pool left of it. In that only enough water remained to keep the household going for a month, when Donald Cameron mustered, and he, Davey, and the stockmen drove the cattle to the Clearwater River, ten miles away to the south-west. It was still in good condition and Cameron held three hundred acres of the river frontage there. He was better off than most of the hill folk who, after driving their cattle a dozen miles or so for water, had to pay high prices for paddocks to run them in.

Every man of Cameron's was away at the Clearwater, and Mrs. Cameron and Jenny alone at the homestead, the afternoon that Deirdre came riding up out of the misty depths of the trees.

For days a heavy, yellowish-grey haze had covered the hills. Mrs. Cameron could not from her doorway see the slopes of the ranges behind the house. The mist hung like a pall over the trees, seeming to stifle the wild life of them. Not a twitter of birds was heard. Parroquets, breaking the dun-coloured mist with the scarlet and blue and green of their wings and breasts, dashed over the clearing, chattering hoarsely. Now and then they rose from the orchard with shrill screams, as Jenny drove them away from the few shrivelled plums left on the trees by flapping a dish-cloth at them. The air was full of the smell of burning.

"The fires have been bad on the other side of the ranges," Deirdre told Mrs. Cameron, as she came into the yard and slipped her bridle from Socks' neck. "Father is taking our poddies and cows, and Steve's, to the Clearwater."

"Yes," Mrs. Cameron said, "some men on the roads told us a few days ago that we'd better get our beasts out of the back paddocks in case the fires come this way."

Deirdre caught Socks by his forelock; but instead of turning him into the paddock behind the stables as she ordinarily did, she led him into one of the fern-spread, earthern-floored stalls and slammed the door on him.

"A man at Steve's this morning said some of the people on the other side 've been burnt out," she said, "The fires swept over the bush as if it were a grass paddock. Martin's, at Dale, is burnt down, and he said that some of the children going home from the Dale school were burnt to death."

Mrs. Cameron exclaimed distressfully.

"The fires came up so quickly they couldn't get home before them," Deirdre continued. "And when they turned to go back the flames were all round. Father sent me up. Davey and Mr. Cameron being away, he thought you mightn't know."

"If the fires are at Dale—"

There was a flicker of anxiety in Mrs. Cameron's eyes.

"They've travelled over forty miles already," Deirdre said. "And father says if the wind changes we'll get them up here for sure. They may sweep right on, as it is, and miss us. But he said it would be madness to try to fight them—with only the three of us, and if they do come this way to get down to the pool at once. He said he'd try to get here if the wind changes."

Once or twice there had been scrub fires in the summer, and Mrs. Cameron, with everybody else on the place, had helped to beat out the quickly-running, forked flames which tried to make their way across the paddocks of the clearing to the house and sheds. She had carried water for the men beating, when there was water to spare, and they had dipped their bags and branches of green gum leaves into the water and slashed at the flames in the grass.

"There are beaters and bags by the barn," she said, "I cut the beaters after Davey and his father had gone, thinking we might want them."

She meant to make a fight for her home if the fires came that way, Deirdre realised.

The afternoon wore away slowly. Mrs. Cameron had few treasures; but she made a bundle of them—a Bible, some of Davey's baby clothes, an old-fashioned gold-rimmed brooch with a mosaic on black stone that Donald Cameron had given her and desired her to wear with the black silk dress he had insisted on her having and appearing in, occasionally, when people began to call him the Laird of Ayrmuir. The dress was more an object of veneration than anything else; but she wrapped it, and the ribband and the piece of lace that she wore with it, into the bundle, and put them, with her spinning wheel and a pair of blue vases that had been her first parlour ornaments, on the back verandah where they would be easy to get if the fires threatened the house.

Deirdre moved restlessly about out of doors, watching the haze on every side of the clearing for any sign of a break in it.

"Are there any animals on the place, Mrs. Cameron?" she asked, late in the afternoon.

"Only a couple of cows and Lass," Mrs. Cameron replied. "They're in the top paddock."

"I'll run them down," Deirdre said.

Straddling Socks, and calling to the toothless old cattle dog who lay dozing on his paws before the kitchen door, she went to the hill-top and brought down the cows and Lass a few minutes later.

"Keep 'em there, Jock!" she said and left the old dog shepherding them in the yard behind the barns.

While she was away, Mrs. Cameron and Jenny had bundled half a dozen hens and a game rooster into a big wicker crate.

Just before sunset they went to the hill-top together, Mrs. Cameron and Deirdre, and Jenny buzzing before them.

Not a puff of air stirred the tawny curtain that obscured the hills. At a little distance the trees stood motionless. The light leaves of the young gum saplings hung, down-pointed, with a stillness that had tragedy in it. Faint and far away in the silence though was a rushing murmur. The smell of burning that had been in the air for days came with a harsher tang. Darkness was making way against the smoke-haze.

Neither Deirdre nor Mrs. Cameron spoke, staring into it.

A flock of parroquets flew out of the haze and scattered across the clearing with shrill, startled screams. A little brown feathered bird dropped into the grass. Deirdre picked it up.

"Its wings are singed," she said quickly, "and they're quite hot still! It can't have flown far."

Tense and alert, she threw back her head. A puff of wind, feather light, almost imperceptible, touched her face.

"It's coming from the west," she breathed.

"Will you take the animals to the pool, Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron said sharply. "Jock'll keep them there. Jenny, you bring the beaters up here. I'll stay and watch to see if the fire breaks. If the wind's from the west, it'll strike us first here."

CHAPTER XIV

When Deirdre returned from the pool, where she had left Lass, the crate of fowls, and the cows with the old dog standing guard over them, Mrs. Cameron was already beating an arrow of flame that had struck the paddock on the hill-top, and Jenny on the other edge of the fences was also beating.

Darkness had fallen. The glare of the fire was visible above the thick standing wall of haze.

Deirdre saw a glittering line break through the grass at a little distance from Mrs. Cameron, and seizing one of the green branches Jenny had thrown down in the centre of the paddock, beat the fire until it went out. Other threads of fire appeared near her, and she followed them along the fence, slashing with the branch until they died down, leaving blackened earth and breaths of virulent blue smoke.

"Stay near the top of the hill, Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron called, "and watch to see if there's a break on the front clearing, or the pool side, or near the sheds!"

Then the fire began to show in a dozen places at once, wriggling lizard-like through the dry, palely-gleaming grass. Beating became automatic, an unflagging lashing and thrashing, and watch had to be kept that the enemy was not attacking in another part of the clearing. The blackened earth smoked under a dead flame one moment, the next a spark kindled and wispish fire was running through the grass again. Far down the hillside, through the smoke mists, to Deirdre on the top, Mrs. Cameron and Jenny looked wraith-like in their white cotton dresses.

The fire in the trees, of which these swift, silent runners in the grass were fore-warners, was still some distance off. But they could hear the crash of falling trees, the rush and roar of the flames in the tangled leafage, shrill cries of the wild creatures of the bush, the blare and bellowing screams of cattle.

Mrs. Cameron's light skirt caught fire. Jenny beat it out with her hands. She and Mrs. Cameron fell back a moment.

The glare lighted the whole of the clearing. In the valley flashing shafts of flame could be seen. They leapt athwart clouds of smoke which drove, billowing, across the sky, sprayed by showers of sparks.

"Mrs. Cameron!" Deirdre screamed warningly as a fire-maddened steer leapt into the paddock and careered across it into the darkness on the other side.

The heat was suffocating. The heavy, acrid smoke in their lungs made their heads reel. Deirdre was fighting a brilliant patch of flames half-way across the paddock when Mrs. Cameron called to her.

"It's no good, child!" she said. Her face was dim with smoke, her hands burnt and blackened. "It's no good trying to do any more, we must go now."

They ran from the hill-top to the house, Mrs. Cameron caught up her bundle, Jenny, the blue vases and the spinning wheel, and Deirdre, taking Socks from the stable in which he was beginning to whinny with fear, led him down the track in front of the house. They were half way across the clearing when Mrs. Cameron came to a standstill. Flames had eaten their way up the paddock and lay across the track.

"We're cut off," she said.

"What can we do?" Deirdre asked. "There's no time to lose."

Jenny screamed, dancing up and down, beside herself with terror and excitement: "We're cut off! Cut off!"

She dropped one of the vases she was carrying, and it broke in a thousand pieces.

"I don't know," Mrs. Cameron said slowly. Her eyes wandered to the broken pieces of the vase.

For a moment Deirdre's brain was paralysed too. She stood staring down the track. All the terrible stories of the fires, of people who had been burnt to death, flashed into her mind.

A shout was raised behind them.

"It's father!" she cried.

The Schoolmaster dashed round the corner of the house. His face was blackened and had angry weals where the fire had lashed it. His eyebrows and beard were singed close to his head. At a glance he took in the situation. His horse with head hung was blowing like a bellows.

"Davey's just behind me!" he gasped, looking at Mrs. Cameron. "Mr. Cameron and he didn't know the fires were making this way till I told them; then he sent Davey. I came ... to give him a hand. Never thought we'd get here—miles of fire across the road. Get a couple of blankets, Deirdre, and we'll make a dash for the creek."

Deirdre ran back to the house, tore the blankets from the beds inside and threw them on to the verandah. He dipped three of them in a bucket of water that stood by the kitchen door, wrapped her in one, and Mrs. Cameron and Jenny in the others.

Davey swung into the yard on an all but spent horse.

"Keep her going, Davey," the Schoolmaster cried, "and get down to the water. I'll look after your mother. Deirdre, you take Jenny up behind you. Fly along and let down the slip panel. Socks'll stand the grass fire if you keep him at it."

Davey and Deirdre dashed across the smouldering and smoking paddock, putting their horses blindly towards the corner of the fence where the slip-rails were already down.

Trees on the edge of the clearing behind the house were already roaring, wrapped in the smoke and flaming mantle of the fire. A shower of sparks thrown up by a falling tree scattered over the stable and barns.

A hoarse yelping, the cackling of fowls and the wild terrified lowing of the cows, came from the pool. Davey rode into it, hustled the cows into the centre, and took the old sheep-dog up on his saddle. Socks, with Deirdre and Jenny on his back, splashed in after him. The Schoolmaster and Mrs. Cameron followed a few moments later. He had caught up her spinning wheel and she was clutching her bundle and the other blue vase.

CHAPTER XV

The fire did not reach the trees above the pool till it had swept the orchards, sheds, and house on the brow of the hill.

Mrs. Cameron watched it devouring them. Every line of the sheds and barns, the eaves and corners of the home that Donald and she had made, was struck against the glare.

The stables fell with a crash. Flames went up from the new weatherboard corner of the house.

"It's like watching someone you love die slowly," she cried.

A breath of wind brought a shower of blackened and burning leaves. By a flank movement the fire was sweeping towards them. The wind springing up gave it zest; it sprang in long brilliant leaps over the quivering tops of the trees. Davey and the Schoolmaster dropped from their horses. Mrs. Cameron, Deirdre and Jenny crouched in the water till the fury of the flames had passed over their heads. Davey had his hands full to keep the cows from breaking away, mad with terror. Socks, the most restive and mettlesome of the horses, started and whinnied as burning leaves struck him. Deirdre threw her wet blanket over him and cowered next to him under it, murmuring soothingly: "There now! Steady, old boy! Steady, my pretty!"

The Schoolmaster held his own horse and Lass, startled out of her peaceful phlegm by the terrifying roar and heat.

Even when the flames had raced on over the tree-tops it was not safe to leave the pool. The men and women in it stood in water to their waists for hours, a red haze enveloping them. The blankets dried in a few minutes. The bush behind them through which the fire had passed showed trees stripped of their greenery and outlined with glowing embers. Some of the dead trees beside the pool burned dully, and fluttering red and blackened leaves drifted from the saplings.

Once Jenny had to dip to her neck as a spark of fire caught her dress.

"Look out, Mrs. Cameron!" Deirdre cried sharply, hearing a crack and seeing a glowing bough waver over Davey's mother.

The Schoolmaster brushed Mrs. Cameron aside, and the bough struck his face. Deirdre uttered a low cry. Davey, too, had seen the Schoolmaster's movement.

"Are you hurt, Mr. Farrel?" he asked anxiously.

"No, it isn't anything at all!" the Schoolmaster replied brusquely, with a half laugh.

Mrs. Cameron herself did not realise what had happened.

To the glare of the fire and the hot red mists, a few hours before dawn, succeeded a heavy darkness, lit only by the columns of dead trees burning to ember.

The night seemed endless. When the first wavering gleam came in the eastern sky it revealed the blackened fringe of the trees, their green waving draperies scorched and fire-eaten, where the fire, like a ravening monster, had half-consumed them and passed on.

The wind had swept the haze and the smoke before it. The bosom of the earth lay bare of the light, dry, wanly-golden grass that had covered it; and from the paddocks and blackened forest thin spirals and breaths of bluish smoke rose and drifted. The peaceful space of trees and the summer-dried grasses about the Ayrmuir homestead were gone. Charred outlines of sheds and what of the house was still left, stood on the brow of the hill.

In the wan light, the pool mirrored the desolation and the haggard and weary men and women who stood in it. Chilled and cramped from being in the water so long, exhausted with the anxieties of the night, they ventured warily back to the still hot earth.

Mrs. Cameron's eyes turned first to her son. His face was grimed with smoke and leaf smuts. There were angry red flushes on it where scraps of burning foliage had struck him. Deirdre's and Jenny's clothes hung to them, scorched and dripping; there were burnt holes in Mrs. Cameron's own dress. Farrel and Davey were drenched to the skin.

The Schoolmaster had tied a handkerchief over his face, covering one eye.

In the first light of the dawn Deirdre exclaimed when she saw it.

"Father," she cried, "you're hurt."

"I'm all right," he said irritably.

She went over to him and lifted the handkerchief.

His face was curiously wrung with pain and blanched beneath the tan and smoke-grime. A clammy sweat beaded on his forehead.

"Hold your tongue, Deirdre," he muttered. "It's only a bit of a burn."

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.

The only places in the district that remained a charred monument to the fires were the school and the school-master's cottage.

The Schoolmaster and Deirdre were living at Steve's again. By a miracle the shanty had escaped the fires; it remained standing when scarcely another house in the countryside did. Steve and two teamsters who had been hung-up on the roads had spent the night watching that flying sparks did not catch its splintery grey shingles. A corrugated iron roof had saved it, they said, although there was a good clearing on either side of the shanty.

For the first few days after the fires, while the rain lasted, Steve's had been stretched to the limit of its capacity to shelter homeless men, women and children. The men camped as best they might in the bar, in the kitchen, and on the verandahs. Mrs. Ross, Jess, Deirdre, and Mrs. Mackay, her baby, and three small boys, slept in one room. And when Steve heard that Mrs. Morrison and Kitty, who had wrapped themselves in wet blankets and crept into a corrugated iron tank while the fires were raging around them, had no shelter but the tank during the rain, the Schoolmaster went to bring them into the shanty, and Steve and the Ross boys rigged a wind and rain screen of boughs and bagging round the verandah to make another room for them.

Deirdre took charge of the domestic arrangements, though everybody lent a hand. Notwithstanding the terrible experiences every member of the house party had passed through, there was much more laughing than sighing, much more finding of humour in every phase of awkward predicaments than dilating on dangers and difficulties. Losses were discussed as the women helped Deirdre to make big, savoury stews and put bumper loaves on the ashes of Steve's hearth, but it was always with concluding exclamations of gratitude that "things were no worse." At Dale, only a few miles on the other side of the ranges, three mothers were weeping for little ones caught in the flames and burnt to death on their way home from school. No lives had been lost on the southern slope of the hills.

All day the men were out riding in the rain, trying to get a better idea of the damage done. They ran up fences, mustered stray cattle, and in the evening brought back pitiful accounts of beasts burned to death in the gullies and dry creek-beds. When they sat with the women round the fire in Steve's kitchen, their great, green-hide boots steaming before it, breathless stories of fights with the fires were told. Most of the men had been away taking cattle to water when the homesteads were attacked. The flames had leapt the crest of the range and circled the clearings with incredible speed. The women had to do the best they could to save the children, the animals left on the farms, and the buildings, and many a good fight had been waged before they sought safety themselves.

It rained steadily for three days; then the sunshine gleamed and Steve's house-party broke up.

The men, restless and eager to repair the damage that had been done, were off at dawn; the women and children followed a few hours later, in lumbering carts and carry-alls. Some of them were going to make a lean-to of boughs and bagging, or of oilskins before night, and some were going for stores to the Port, or to the new township that was springing up about the Wirree river. There was bound to be plenty of work for every pair of hands for months to come.

While everybody was busy, felling, fencing, splitting, and running up new buildings, it was rumoured that the Schoolmaster and Deirdre were going to leave the hills.

CHAPTER XVII

Davey had said good-bye to the Schoolmaster.

"Well, I'll be going now," he said, moving away clumsily.

He had said all he could, though there was not much of that. Most of what he wanted to say remained deep within him. He could not dig it up. The words to express his feeling would not come. He had muttered something about "passing that way" and having come in "to say good-bye," when he entered the big, bare room at Steve's.

He had not seen Deirdre, nor the Schoolmaster, since the night of the fires. His father had kept him busy; and with all the work of the new buildings going up at Ayrmuir there was plenty to do. He talked of it for a while in a strained, uninterested fashion.

"Deirdre told me mother put up a great fight for the house," he said, "but of course the old man doesn't give her credit for that—thinks he could have saved it, if he had been on the spot in time. I wish he had been there. I'd like to 've seen if he could've beaten a fire—with that wind against him. I might've been with mother a bit earlier and been able to help her, if I'd had a decent nag—and that's what I told him—but I'm not likely to get one. The expense of the new buildings has got him down, and he's mad because Nat left a couple of hundred yearlings in one of the back paddocks. We ran in about a hundred of 'em last week—found some burnt to cinders—the others 've got away."

Awkwardly, uncertainly, he shifted his feet. He did not want to go, to say the final words, and yet he did not know how to stay. Farrel understood that and kept him talking longer. He was still wearing a bandage over his left eye.

"Your eye's all right, isn't it?" Davey asked. "It isn't seriously hurt? Mother was asking me the other day if it was better. She doesn't know how it happened, Mr. Farrel."

"How what happened?" Farrel asked.

A spasm of pain twitched his lean, sunburnt features. He was sitting with his back to the light on a low bench under the window.

"How you got that burn about your eyes," said Davey. "But I saw. If you hadn't tried to prevent the branch falling on mother, the way she was standing, it would have come down on her face."

"It might have fallen on any of us."

The Schoolmaster spoke sharply.

"I hope you're not going to have any trouble with it," Davey said.

"No, of course not."

Dan rose from his seat under the window.

"You'll be wanting to say good-bye to Deirdre, too, won't you, Davey?"

He went across to the door and called into the next room:

"Davey's going, Deirdre!"

But though a muffled sound of someone moving came from it, there was no answer.

He called again; but still there was no reply.

"She must have gone to bring in the cows for Steve," the Schoolmaster said. "Never mind, I'll tell her you left a message for her."

"Yes," said the boy, folding and re-folding his hat.

But it did not seem the same thing as seeing Deirdre and saying good-bye to her himself.

"Mind, if there's any books you're wanting, or any way I can help you, if you want to study more, you can always let me know, and I'll be glad to do anything I can for you," the Schoolmaster said. "Steve will pass a letter on to me. I don't know where we'll settle at first, or just what we're going to do, but he'll generally know our whereabouts. And there's one other thing I'd like to say, Davey, you can always be sure of a friend in the world. If you get into a scrape, or any sort of trouble, will you remember that?"

They gripped hands.

"Thank you, Mr. Farrel," Davey muttered. "But I wish you weren't going," he added, desperately.

"I wish we weren't too," Farrel said with a sigh, "but then you see people don't want to build the school again. They don't think there's the same need for one now. Most of the girls I've been teaching for the last few years can teach the children coming on well enough. And besides, there's talk of Government schools being set up everywhere."

"Yes."

Davey's countenance was one of settled gloom.

"Good-bye."

The Schoolmaster wrung his hand.

Davey found himself lifting his rein from the docked sapling in the shanty yard.

Two other horses, with reins hung over the post, stood before Steve's bar; a couple of cattle dogs lay at their heels nosing the dust. The fowls scratching in the stable-yard spread their wings and cackled as he turned out of the yard to the road.

"So-long, Davey," the Schoolmaster called from the verandah.

"S'-long," Davey replied.

The loose gravel rolled under his mare's feet as she slipped and slid down the hill, the reins hanging loose on her neck. He looked straight before him, trying to understand the state of his mind. He had not expected to be so disturbed at taking leave of the Schoolmaster. Then he remembered that he had not seen Deirdre—to say good-bye to her, he thought.

For the first time he realised that she was going away—going out of his life. Perhaps that realisation had been at the bottom of his thought all the time; but it struck him suddenly, viciously, now.

He was looking into the distance, dazed by the tumult within him, when a blithe voice called him, and glancing up he saw Deirdre standing on the bank by the roadside.

"There you are, Davey!" she cried. "Going away without saying a word to me! I'd a good mind to let you go."

She was breathless with running across the paddocks to reach the turn in the road. The wind had blown her dark hair into little tendrils about her face, and there was a sparkle of anger in her eyes.

"I heard what you said to father," she went on, "and if you haven't anything better to say to me, I'll go back."

Davey gazed at her. He gazed as though he had never seen her before. She seemed another creature, nothing like the ragged little urchin who had climbed trees with him and ridden to school straddle-legged behind him; nothing like the sedate housewife his mother had made of her, either.

Deirdre stared at him too, as though he were quite different from the Davey she had known. A shy smile quivered on her lips. She plucked nervously at trails of the scarlet-runners which overhung the bank, and put the end of a runner between her teeth and chewed the stalk.

Davey saw that her lips were as scarlet as the flowers that, like broken-winged butterflies, hung at the end of the trail.

He slid off his horse and stood facing her. His limbs were trembling.

"What's the matter?" she asked, a little distress creeping into her voice.

Davey's face was tense and colourless.

To the trouble which had surprised him that day, a strange soft thrill was added when she put the runner stalk with its scarlet flowers between her teeth. It struck him with a strange pang that Deirdre was beautiful, that her lips were the same colour as the flowers hanging near them.

It was all translated, this emotion of his, in the shamed, shy smile that came into his face as he stared at her.

Deirdre understood well enough.

She scrambled down the bank and went to him.

"You are sorry we're going, aren't you, Davey?" she asked.

He nodded, finding he could not speak.

The gloom of the forest was closing round them, the sunset dying. She sighed and slipped her hand into his.

After a few moments, as he said nothing, she spoke again.

"It'll be all changed, I suppose, when father and I come back," she said. "We will come back, by and by, sometime, you know, father says. We'll come to see Steve, perhaps. But we'll be grown up ... quite, you and I, Davey. You'll be married, and I—"

"What?"

Davey had wakened.

"I was saying, we'll be grown-up and married, perhaps by the time we see each other again," Deirdre murmured. "None of the times'll come again like the ones when we went home on Lass, or in the spring-cart, or walked, and chased wallies and went after birds' nests. I wish they could! I wish I could be just ten when I come back and give you a race down the road, Davey."

Her voice ran on quickly, but Davey's mind stuck on her first words.

"There's only one girl I'll be married to," he said.

"Yes." Her eyes leapt to his. "Jess Ross!"

"Who says so?"

"She does." Deirdre laughed. "She says she's the only girl you've ever kissed. And her mother says—"

"When she was a kid, they put her face up to me; but I never kissed her—or any girl," Davey said.

"I didn't believe it, of course!"

Deirdre laughed softly.

"Why?"

"Well—I thought—if there was any girl you'd be wanting to kiss, it would be me, Davey!"

The bright shy glance that flew towards him, and the quiver of her lips, fired the boy.

His arms went out to her. He caught her shoulder and held her to him. For an instant he did not know whether it was night or day. But when he withdrew from that moment of unconsciousness, wild, uncontrollable joy and possession, his eyes were humid. And her eyes beneath his were like pools in the forest which the fallen-leaf mould has darkened and the twilight striking through the trees makes a dim, mysterious mirror of.

"Deirdre," he whispered, as if he had never before said her name, and to say it were like singing in church.

He kissed her again, slowly and tenderly; the first pressure of her lips had made a man of him.

"You're my sweetheart, aren't you, Deirdre?" he said exultingly, holding her in his arms and gazing down at her. "When you come back we'll be married."

"Yes," Deirdre whispered.

Her eyes reflected the glow of her heart.

"I've always meant to marry you, Davey, though I've sometimes pretended I liked Mick Ross, or Buddy Morrison better." She drew a little sigh. "But I'm so glad it's all settled, now ... and we're really going to marry each other."

The sunset had died out of the sky, and the forest was dark about them when they kissed and whispered "good-bye—for a little while." Davey could scarcely say the words. He watched Deirdre as she fled up hill to the shanty; then leaping on his horse he sent her clattering down hill, all his young manhood—the tumult of his love, awakened senses, rejoicing and dreams—orchestrating within him.

CHAPTER XVIII

In the earliest days of Port Southern, settlers tracking inland or further along the coast, had to cross the Wirree, driving their cattle and horses before them. The shallows of the river where they crossed began to be called the Wirree Ford. The tracks converged there, and it was not long before a shanty appeared on the left bank a few hundred yards from the broad and slowly-moving river.

The Wirree came down from the hills and flowed across the plains at the foot of the ranges. The whole of the flat land it watered was spoken of as the Wirree river district, or the Wirree. The stream emptied itself into the waters of Bass Straits. Opposite was Van Diemen's Land, the beautiful green island on which penal settlements had been established. Men had been known to escape from it to the mainland. They made the dangerous passage of the Straits in open boats, and sometimes were picked up in an exhausted condition by a frigate policing the coast, or a trader, and sent back to Hobart Town or Port Arthur. Sometimes their dead bodies were tossed by the sea on the shores they had been trying to reach, and sometimes, steering by the muddy waters of the river that flowed out from the nearest point opposite the Island, bearing silt and drift-wood for a couple of miles into the sea, they reached the land of promise and freedom.

As the beaten grass path along the seaboard became the main stock route between Port Southern and Rane, a newly-founded settlement at the further eastern end of the coast, a township of curious mushroom growth, cropped up about the Wirree Ford and McNab's shanty.

It was a collection of huts, wattle and dab, whitewashed, for the most part; but some of them were of sun-baked sods, plastered together, or of the stones which were scattered over the plains or filled the creek beds. McNab's weatherboard shanty, with its sign-board of a black bull, with red-rimmed eyes on a white ground, was by far the most pretentious. The history of these dwellers about McNab's was a matter of suspicion. They arrived from nowhere, out of the night, silently, and it was surmised, crept up the river in the cockle-shell boats which had brought them over the Straits and were sunk in the slowly-moving river when they had served their purpose.

The fertile flats, stretching to the edge of the mountains, had been taken up before McNab got his holding on an arm of the Wirree. He set about acquiring the selvedge of the plains which was cut off from the finer, more arable land by a scrubby line of densely growing ti-tree. Most of the Wirree Ford men ran cattle on these strips of coarse-grassed land, thrashed by the sea breezes. But they were no sticklers for the niceties of boundaries and property laws. They drove their first, wild-eyed, scraggy herds whither they listed, a cursing, blasphemous crew, none dared gainsay them. It was reckoned better to have the good-will than the enmity of the Wirree river men. The body of a settler who had threatened "to have the law of them" for grazing their beasts on his land was, a few days afterwards, found in the river, drifting with the tide out to sea. Some of the Wirree men made a living as fishermen. Others maintained themselves by a desultory farming. They ploughed the grey land of the seaboard with wooden hand-ploughs. But many of them thrived on what they could make out of the stockmen and drovers who passed through the township on their way to Rane or to the Port.

McNab was powerful enough even in those days, and many and ingenious were the stories he invented to account for the presence of men who came to the Wirree Ford unexpectedly.

As the settlement grew, it did justice to the rumoured accounts of its origin. McNab's was the meeting place of stockmen, drovers and teamsters on the southern roads, and the carouses held there were night-long. It was recognised as a hotbed of thieves and ruffians by the roadsters, and no man of substance or any pretensions at all, would lodge the night in any of the mud-built huts within a stone's throw of the river.

Before long, the Wirree men had fat cattle to dispose of. An open space between the huts, not far from McNab's, was used as a sale yard. It was then that settlers who wanted good prices for their beasts had to drive them to the Wirree market. A better bargain was driven in the Wirree square than anywhere else. So Wirree Ford became Wirreeford, and thrived and prospered until it was the busiest cattle market in the south.

To a certain extent, its prosperity threw an air of respectability over it. At first, cattle-owners and farmers from the hills entered the township in the morning and left it before the shadows of night fell. They did their business, and left the Wirree not much better off for their coming, venturing into the shanty for a midday meal only, and drinking sparingly, if at all, of the curious, dark spirits it vended.

Then stores were opened. There were less fearsome comings and goings. Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty set up a shanty and proceeded to business with an air of great propriety. Women and children were brought into the township for the cattle sales. Sale days became weekly holidays. They meant the donning of festive ribbands by the women and children, the climbing into high spring-carts and buggies, and driving along the winding track from the hills to the township, where groceries, dress stuffs and household furnishings could be bought, and stowed in the back of the carts for the home journey.

Sale days, however, still ended in gaming and drinking brawls at the shanties, and sometimes in the dropping of a heavy, still body into the Wirree, when the tides would carry it out to sea.

It was the disappearance of a young farmer from the West Hills after a night at the Black Bull that made Donald Cameron decide to take action. He, backed by other farmers and well-to-do hill settlers, made representations to the Port authorities as to the lawless character and conduct of Wirreeford township.

A trooper who rode into it a few days later was pelted with stones, tarred and feathered, and sent back to Port Southern.

Then a building was rim-up on the outskirts of the township—a ramshackle house built of overlapping, smooth, pine shingles. It was whitewashed, so that it stood out on the darkest nights to remind roisterers that law and order were in their midst. And as soon as it was finished, John M'Laughlin, a police-sergeant from the Port, took up his residence in it. He mitigated the impression that undue severity would be meted out to evil-doers from the new police head-quarters, by genially brawling with most of his neighbours at McNab's as soon as he arrived, very successfully intimating that he was far too long-sighted, easy-going and convivial a soul to interfere with the Wirree's little way of doing things.

Donald Cameron was well known in Wirreeford when it began to be a cattle market of importance. So was Davey—Young Davey—as he was called when he began to go regularly to the sales in the years that followed the fires.

Cameron worked all day in the sale-yards with his men. He drove in his own beasts in the morning, threw off his coat for the drafting and, when the sales were over, went out of the township, a stolid, stooping figure, on his heavy bay cob. Although he sometimes made close on a thousand pounds on a day's sales, he went out of the township, as often as not, without spending a penny.

It was said that he was the wealthiest man in the countryside, and as "mean as they make 'em." Yet his disinclination to spend money was made subservient to his sense of justice; and a spirit of matter-of-fact integrity that he carried round with him made the Wirree people regard him with suspicious awe. The iron quality of his will, the hard, straight gaze of his eyes, were difficult things for men with uneasy consciences to encounter. Because he was the first man in the country, it was reckoned a matter of prestige to have the patronage of Donald Cameron of Ayrmuir, whether for a meal, store order, or any job whatever. In jest, half earnest, he was called the Laird of Ayrmuir.

Wirree men said that Thad McNab loathed Donald Cameron "as the devil loathes holy water."

McNab was not the devil in their eyes, nor Donald Cameron holy water, but the saying perhaps suggested to them the composite forces of the two men. Thad, with his twisted mind, his cruel eyes, his treacherous underhand ways, stood to them for something in the nature of the power of evil. Donald Cameron, with his harsh integrity, his unbending virtue, his parsimony, and sober respectability, stood for something in the nature of abstract good. They had the respect for him that people sometimes have for a standard which has been hung before their eyes, and which they have not been able to live up to. But Thad was their aider and abettor.

Thad, for all his tyrannies, blackmail, petulances, made life easier for them. They stood by him and blessed him, cursing Donald Cameron and his sort, who would have sent them back to the prison cells and torture of the Island. It was not from motives of sheer kindness that McNab stood by them, they knew, but because it paid him. Nevertheless, the thing worked out in the same way. Donald Cameron was more their enemy than Thad. Thad's feud with him amused them as much as a cock fight; their money was on their own bird, and they barracked for him, idly, light-heartedly, scoffing at his enemy.

Almost every man in the Wirree was in McNab's debt. He knew more about their lives and antecedents than was to their soul's comfort. They suspected that more than one of the men who had been taken back to the Island had been put away by McNab, and that those lean, crooked hands of his had fingered Government money—rewards for the capture of escaped convicts. But so long as they were in with Thad McNab, Wirreeford men with pasts that would not bear looking into thought they were all right. Although there were rumours of treacherous dealings on his part, with child-like simplicity, with the faith of the desperate, they trusted McNab, believing that he stood between them and the prisons of Port Arthur. They believed that if they were "in with Thad," they need not wake, sweating, out of their sleep at the thought of the "cat," or worry if, forgetful of consequences, they gave that tell-tale start at the clank and rattle of irons.

It was pretty well understood that Thad McNab and Sergeant M'Laughlin "worked" together. Thad had been hand-in-glove with him since he came to the Wirree River. The fact sometimes stood unruly spirits in good stead when there was a merry night at the Black Bull. But when there was an inconvenient accident over the cards once or twice, and when there was a hold-up on the Rane road just outside the township, too, it was conceded that M'Laughlin had earned his screw. Thad saw to it that occasionally he made an appearance of doing his duty. If it had been imagined at head-quarters that Sergeant M'Laughlin winked at irregularities in the application of the law at Wirreeford, he might have been moved on, and that would not have suited the landlord of the Black Bull, who would then have had another man to deal with, or have found that another man was dealing with him.

Donald Cameron made no secret of his attitude to McNab. After M'Laughlin had been several months in the township, and there was no outward or visible sight of his having mended its ways, Mr. Cameron made representation to the authorities at Port Southern, and through them to the powers that had their official residence in Melbourne, in respect to Thadeus McNab's position and breaches of the law in Wirreeford. He was clear in his own mind that there was a case against McNab; first, for harbouring convicts escaped from Van Diemen's Land; and secondly, for being the possessor of a still, and for turning it to account in sly grog making. John Ross, Mathew Morrison, and the rest of the hill folk and settlers at the farther end of the plains, upheld him in this effort to rid the district of McNab; but although an inquiry was made, nothing came of it.

Donald Cameron gained no extra popularity in the Wirree on the first of his counts. Thad's position was, if anything, strengthened by Cameron's hostility. Every man in the township knew that he had to stand by McNab, or McNab would not stand by him; therefore when an officer from the Port came to investigate conditions in Wirreeford, he found nothing to take exception to. He reported that the local police officer was efficient, and that complaints of the hill settlers were due to a personal rancour existing between Donald Cameron and the landlord of the Black Bull.

Thad flourished like a green bay tree after this failure to move him, and forged the weapon of a very serviceable hate against Donald Cameron. He kept it very carefully scabbarded, but occasionally it leapt forth, and its mettle was visible to all and sundry. Ordinarily, Thad kept a locked brain; it was only in rare transports of rage that he revealed anything of its crooked workings. And then those who saw them looked to their own behaviour, and were careful to do nothing that would bring them into its toils.

Probably nobody but Cameron himself thought McNab had swallowed that little business of the inquiry when, a few months later, he was fawning round him, telling him that dinners were to be served at the "Bull" on sale days, and that his patronage would be an esteemed favour. Those who heard him say: "Things has not been as they might have been, always, at the Black Bull, Mr. Cameron—you have had reason to complain in the past—but everything is goin' to be different for the future," could not believe their ears. It was very humbly, with a flattering deference, that McNab had asked "the laird" to help him to improve the tone of the place by occasionally having a meal in it.

Donald Cameron had been in the habit of taking his meat-pasty, or bread and cheese sandwich to the sale yards in his pocket. He ate his lunch there at midday when most of the men made tracks for the bar opposite. But after a while, he took his meals at the Black Bull, lowering not a whit of his dignity in the doing of it, and treating McNab as curtly in his own establishment as he did anywhere else. When he was down with rheumatics in the early spring, the place had open doors to Davey. He was served like a duke in it.

Young Davey promised to be a chip of the old block, the Wirree said. He worked as insatiably as the old man, and was no more than a roadmender by the look of him. His grey trousers had many a patch on them, and his hat was as weathered a bit of felt as was seen in the yards. He walked with the slouch of the cattle-men—men who have spent most of their days in the saddle.

When he flung off his hat, it was seen he was good-looking enough, with an air of breed about him, a something the Wirree did not quite get. There was a great deal of his mother in the cast of his features, and his eyes were grey and green like hers, but his mouth was Donald Cameron's set in a boy's face. Davey was a shy, awkward fellow and spoke as little as the old man, though it was acknowledged that if his hand was as rarely in his breeches' pockets as his father's, it was because there was nothing in them. It was well known that Donald Cameron worked his son like a convict, and kept him on short commons, giving him neither wages nor pocket-money, so that he blushed when a down-and-out blackguard asked him for the price of drink and he had not got it to give.

He fed with the old man, this young Davey Cameron, and was never seen in the bars. Few of the men who entered the shanties could say that they had had much to do with Cameron and his son, except John Ross and the Morrison boys, who occasionally dropped into McNab's. But they were of the same sort—hardworking, thrifty, God-fearing, respectable, homely people of the hills, who despised the Wirree River township, its antecedents, descendants, and associations, and did business with it only because business was better done there than anywhere else.

The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had been gone from the hills for over a year when Wirreeford began to make concessions for the sake of the younger generation.

Although cards were shuffled and dice were thrown at the Black Bull, when the rush-lights flickered in the windows after the sales, and the little fires of cow-dung—lighted before the doors of the houses to keep away the sandflies and mosquitoes—glowed in the dusk, sending up faint wreaths of blue smoke, Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty threw open her parlour, and there was dancing in it until the small hours.

The hill people lent the countenance of their presence to days of out-door sports, and to the dancing at Mrs. Hegarty's on Christmas and New Year's day. The Ross boys danced with bright-eyed Wirree girls. Morrison's Kitty and some of the other girls from the hills learnt the reels and jigs that their parents had danced in the country beyond the seas, they were always talking of. The old people danced too. There were nights of wholesome, heart-warming merriment and the singing of old songs.

Only Donald Cameron and his wife held aloof from these festivities. But before long it was observed that Young Davey was going to the monthly dancing with the Rosses. He rode down from the hills with the boys and Jess. They made the Wirree streets ring as they galloped to Hegarty's, and their laughter streeled out on the wind behind them, as they went home in the early hours of the morning, when even the roisterers at the Black Bull had fallen asleep in uneasy attitudes about its verandahs.

CHAPTER XIX

It was not every day there was dancing at Mrs. Mary Ann's—only on Fridays, after the cattle sales.

And it was not every Friday that Pat Glynn could be got for the music. He wandered all over the country putting the devil into folks' heels. He was in the Port one day, in Wirreeford the next, then on to Rane, or off wandering somewhere over the ranges. Whenever word went round that Pat was coming the couples gathered from every direction. Whether they danced on a wooden floor or on the grass was a matter of little importance. There was always a merry time when Pat Glynn put up anywhere for the night.

He came trotting into Wirreeford on the day of the early November sales, about two years after Deirdre and the Schoolmaster had left the hills. The township was full of dust, cattle, and dogs; boys, yelling, drafting and beating beasts from one yard to another, men watching them, drovers, lean, sun-dried, hawk-eyed men, cattle-buyers, cattle-owners and auctioneers. Horses were hanging on loose reins about the sale-yards, or in rows with drooping heads along the hitching posts at the Black Bull and Mrs. Hegarty's. Two or three heavy family carry-alls were drawn up before the store where the women, with children about them, were shopping, buying lengths of calico, dress stuffs, or groceries and ironmongery, to take home to the hills.

Word that Pat Glynn was at Hegarty's went round like wildfire.

So at Mrs. Mary Ann's it was that all the miscellaneous crowd of the sale-yards foregathered. They danced until the blood boiled under weather-beaten, leathern faces, and the rising sweat left furrows in the dust of the road on them. Matted, lank, sun-bleached hair lay in wet streaky locks on foreheads marked with the line of hats that almost grew on them—the line beyond which the sunburn never travelled. Men, women, boys and girls of all ages, children, grandfathers and grandmothers, Pat danced them all to a state of breathless exhaustion.

As he tucked his fiddle under his chin and raked it with his long bow, his eyes gleamed with mischief and merriment. His arm went backwards and forwards so dexterously, with such agility, that the gay airs he played possessed him as well as everyone who heard them. Old men and women left their benches by the wall and skipped and trundled until the pine floor shook.

The only people who were not dancing were a young mother with a baby in her arms and a teamster too drunk to do more than hang by the doorpost. He attempted a few wild and hilarious movements, fell headlong and was dragged feet foremost to the door and thrown out, because he cumbered the floor. The young mother joggled her baby and sang softly in tune to Pat's music, enfolding the assembled company and Pat himself in her beaming smile.

It was incense to Pat's soul to see everybody within earshot moving. The clatter, rhythmic lift, shuffle and thump of heavily-shod feet was as good to his ears as any of the old airs he played.

His arm flying quicker and quicker, sent old and young along with the strain of his music, like corks on a stream. Heads bobbed, feet stamped busily. A catch of laughter flew out. The elderly, stout mother of a family called breathlessly: "Stop it, Pat! Stop it, ye villain!" But Pat only laughed and his fiddle arm flew faster, till the dancers dropped exhausted against the wall, or hung there gasping with a stitch in their sides. When he had tired them all out, he lifted his bow with a flourish and a shout of laughter.

The two that kept the floor longer than most others were Jess—Ross's Jess, as she was called—and young Davey Cameron. They were reckoned a fine pair of dancers. Pat had great pride in them. When everybody else had left the floor he made the pace faster and faster for them, till they whirled to a finish, watched and cheered by the crowd against the walls. Off-scourings and derelicts of the Wirree, whom Mrs. Hegarty would not have to dance in her parlour, had to amuse themselves by looking in the doorway, or by jigging as best they might out of doors under the star-strewn sky.

It was that night of the November sales, when Pat was at Hegarty's, that the Schoolmaster and Deirdre came back to the Wirree.

They put up at the Black Bull, and it was not until the dance was in full swing that they appeared in Mrs. Hegarty's doorway. Pat was speeding up a reel, his eyes kindling.

"Faith, it's a drop of the craythur you want to waken you up, Mick Ross," he called.

Catching up the air of his tune, he sang gaily, and the company joined in breathlessly at the top of its lungs.

He broke from the song into expostulation and explanation.

"There's the darlin' boy. Buddy Morrison," he cried, tears of laughter running down his withered cheeks. "But he'll break Morrison's daughter's back for her! Let you be gentle with the girl, Buddy. It's a young lady, sir, not a heifer ye have by the horns—"

It was when Davey and Jess were having their last fling against Pat's music, and he scraping for all he was worth to beat them in their whirling and turning, that Jess saw a tall, dark-eyed girl watching them on the outskirts of the people who had just stopped dancing. She knew her at once, her dark eyes, white skin, the black hair that swept back from her face. It was Deirdre—Deirdre grown very tall and lithe and straight-backed—Deirdre in a dark dress with a necklace of red beads about her neck and a blue ribband round her waist.

Jess knew what the look in her eyes meant as she watched the dancing; she knew and her heart exulted. Deirdre would see that Davey and she had become great friends while she was away. He had not seen the girl in the doorway. He flung Jess backwards and forwards, flushed and excited, spurred on by the music and the test of keeping step, losing no movement of hers, to be even with Pat when he drew his last chords. Jess flew with him. Davey saw no more of her than her sonsy face, surrounded with the fair wisps of curls. Her grey eyes came to him and her lips parted and smiled as her arms went out to him. She stumbled and fell breathlessly at the last; he had to hold her to prevent her falling.

When up at the far end of the room he recovered his breath, his eyes were shining. His laughter rang out, a gay challenge in it:

"How's that for a finish, Pat?"

"Oh, ye're a deevil, Davey!" the old man cried, mopping his forehead.

Jess had put herself before Davey and his view of the door; but he had moved to call to the fiddler.

He saw the group there and stood staring for a moment. The colour ebbed from his face. He recognised the Schoolmaster, though he wore a shade over one eye now, but it was the sight of the dark head, the turn of a girl's shoulder and back near him that was a shock to Davey. The great moment had come. Deirdre had returned.

She stood with her back to the room, men and women gathered about her and the Schoolmaster. Davey heard her voice ring out. The sound of it thrilled him and left him trembling. It seemed only yesterday that she had gone ... and yet it was ages—three years. They had written once or twice at first, but somehow the letters had stopped. He had not heard from her for a long time. What could he do? What a lot there would be to tell her. He wanted to show her his new horse, a sturdy red-bay that he had coveted on sight and had induced his father to buy. Would he ever be able to go and speak to her, he wondered, his legs shook so. Would he be able to speak? His throat ached. Did she know that he, Davey, her sweetheart, was there against the wall, so full of love for her that he could not move, that he could only gaze at her. If only she would come to him. If only the whole of Mrs. Mary Ann's room would fall away from them—leave them, just Deirdre and he, together. He did not see Jess, did not realise that she was watching him with a pain in her eyes at the spell-bound wonder and adoration of his.

"It's Deirdre," she said, as if for her the end of the world had come.

"Yes," he breathed.

He could hear Deirdre laughing and chattering with the men and girls who had been to school with her when she and the Schoolmaster lived in the hills. The Schoolmaster had gone out of doors again; but where he had been, a long, black-browed drover of Maitland's, Conal—Fighting Conal—was standing, leaning against the wall and smiling down on her. Beneath the inexplicable exhilaration, the tingling, thrilling joy which possessed Davey, a slow wrath surged, at the way Conal looked and smiled at Deirdre, and at the way she looked—her eyes leaping up to his—and smiled at Conal. But she was his, his sweetheart, and had promised to marry him, Davey told himself, and the resurgent joy at seeing her flooded him.

"Aren't you going to dance, Davey?" Jess asked anxiously, when Pat began to fiddle again.

"No," he said.

"If you're not going to get-up, can I have this one with Jess?" asked Buddy Morrison with restrained eagerness.

"What?" Davey asked, his eyes on Deirdre.

"If you're not getting-up, can I have this one with Jess?" repeated Bud Morrison. His sun-scorched face and ruddy hair was responsible for his youthful appearance although he was older by a couple of years than Davey.

He was Jess's most humble adorer, but his grief was that she would never look at him if Davey was looking at her.

"Oh, yes," Davey replied.

He watched Jess and Buddy Morrison go out among the dancers. His eyes flew back to where Deirdre had been standing. But she was dancing with Conal.

A lightning tremor of surprise flickered through him; he caught his breath. That anybody but himself would dance with Deirdre had not occurred to him. He made up his mind that he would go to her after the dance. What right had Conal to dance with her? He was caught in a cloud of troubled thought and dismay.

Davey watched them dancing, this tall slender girl with her hair knotted up on the nape of her neck and the long-limbed, bearded man who had come to the sales for Sam Maitland. He could dance. He and Deirdre were dancing as the people in Wirreeford had never seen folk dancing, and Conal's dark, handsome face was turned down to the girl's. It was not the dance he was thinking of, but her. There was a gleam in his eyes as they covered her; every movement was tender of her.

Jess, in a fury of impatience with her partner, dragged him off the floor. He was heavy and slow on his feet, missed the time, and muddled his steps. In order not to disgrace her own dancing she had to fall back against the wall.

When Deirdre came away from the dancers with her tall partner, Davey went round to where they were standing. Once only he had seen her flash a swift glance round the room, then her eyes had not rested on him at all, but skimmed past him like swallows in flight. He thought that she had not recognised him.

Now that he stood near her his heart throbbed pain-fully. She laughed and chattered with the people about her. Davey caught a word or two of her greetings to old schoolfellows. Conal bent over her appropriatingly. Deirdre flashed a smile at him as she talked.

Davey stood on the edge of the crowd. A little hurt feeling began to grow in him. Would he never catch her eye? Would she never look his way?

Pat was calling for another dance.

The little crowd shifted and drifted away from Deirdre.

Mick Ross had the temerity to ask her if she would dance with him.

Davey heard him, and he heard Long Conal drawl lazily in reply:

"The man that dances with Deirdre will have to reck'n with me to-night."

"Well, I'm not wanting to reck'n with you, Conal," Mick replied, laughing, and withdrew to find another partner.

Davey's eyes sparkled.

He walked up to where Deirdre stood in the doorway with the drover.

"Will you dance with me, Deirdre?" he said.

"Why!" she exclaimed blithely, much as he had heard her exclaim to a dozen others, "It's Davey Cameron grown up! I'd never 've known you, Davey, but for the scar on your neck where the calf kicked you. Do you remember the day we were taking him up to Steve's in the spring-cart?"

"Davey and I used to have great times at the school," she explained with a glance for Conal.

"This is Conal, you know, Long Conal, Davey—Fighting Conal—they call him, don't they?" she went on with a little mischievous inflection in her voice.

"Yes, I know," said Davey. "Will you dance with me, Deirdre?"

Few people south of the ranges did not know, or had not heard of Fighting Conal, of Sally, the yellow streak of a cattle dog, half dingo, that he swore by, and of his three parts bred mare, Ginger. "Ginger for pluck," Conal said, and that was why she got her name. Though he had his title to live up to, Conal was a prime favourite on the roads. It was rumoured that he had another name, but nobody ever bothered about it. Conal—Fighting Conal—was a good enough name for any man to go by, it was reckoned.

There was talk under the breath of cattle-duffing sometimes when he was mentioned. But it was always under the breath, for Conal was a man with a fist that could punish any reflections on his character as thoroughly as the fist of a man had ever been known to. But he was a lightsome swaggerer, a reckless, devil-me-care, good-natured sort of bully.

"Then if you know," said Conal coolly, "you'd better have gone home and to bed, young shaver, before havin' asked Deirdre to dance with you to-night. I don't like any interference with the partners I choose for meself."

It was all said with a lazy good-natured air. Conal was sure of himself. He reviewed with faint amusement this youngster who made claims to privileges that he had reserved to himself for the evening.

"Will you dance with me, Deirdre?" Davey asked again.

His eyes blazed; he trembled with anger.

"Well, I'm—"

Conal straightened and swore amazedly.

But Deirdre's hand caught his sleeve.

"We're missing all this dance," she said quickly. As she turned away on his arm, her eyes swung round to Davey. "Go and find Jess," she said, "you looked such a pretty couple dancing together when I came in."

Her laughter and light-hearted little speech stupefied Davey. He forgot his anger, forgot Conal, forgot the roomful of dancers stampeding merrily, forgot Pat Glynn and his music. He forgot everything, but that Deirdre was laughing at him. Her words tingled in his ears; he had heard her laughter—Deirdre, his sweetheart, was laughing at him—Deirdre who had promised—

He stumbled out of the room.

CHAPTER XX

"Davey!"

The Schoolmaster's voice went out with a glad note in it. He turned aside from the men who were talking with him outside Mrs. Hegarty's parlour. His arm stretched to grip the boy's hand.

But Davey swung past. He did not see or hear. He did not even know where he was going. He walked through darkness, surging darkness, though the night was a clear one, stars diamond-bright on the inky-blue screen of the sky. The houses of the Wirree were white in the light. Deep shadows were cast back from their walls as they squatted against the earth.

Davey turned the angle of the house into the stable yard.

Instinct carried him to it, and to the fence where his horse was tethered. There was a fluttered cackle of fowls, a startled yelping of dogs, as he threw on his saddle and turned out of the yard, taking the road to the hills.

The men outside Hegarty's, smoking and swopping yarns with the Schoolmaster, watched him go. Sparks of white fire flew from his horse's hoofs as they beat along the road.

"Young Davey's riding as though the devil were at his heels," someone remarked, through teeth that gripped a pipe.

"Never seen him ride like that before," Thad McNab said.

Farrel did not speak; he wondered too what it was had sent the boy out into the night like that. Half an hour before he had seen him dancing with Jess Ross, and his face had just such a look as his mother's might have had when she was his age, and dancing.

He looked back into the room. Jess was sitting, a very forlorn, dejected little figure on a bench by herself. Deirdre was dancing with Conal.

Instinctively he associated Davey's going with Deirdre.

They had been such good friends when they were children, and he had imagined that they would be so glad to meet each other again.

He followed Deirdre as she danced with Conal. Conal was an old friend of his. He had seen a good deal of him since they left the hills, and few men had the place in the Schoolmaster's regard and affection that Long Conal had. He had been with them on several of their wanderings, and Deirdre and he had always seemed to get on like brother and sister together, he thought. But now he saw the gleam in Conal's eyes as he bent over her, the tenderness in his swarthy face, Deirdre's smile, her swift glances, shy and alluring, her averted head. The way she laughed and moved were a revelation to him.

"So Deirdre's a woman and at woman's tricks," he thought.

She had been a child to him till this night. Conal with his sunburnt, bearded face, his rough hands, his eyes, bright with love and laughter, had made a woman of her, he told himself. And what had she made of him? The Schoolmaster saw his eyes on her neck where the dark curls gathered dewily.

He knew as much as there was to be known of Long Conal, knew that he had flirted and drunk and sworn his way along all the stock routes in the country. He had kissed and ridden away times without number. But there was something else in his eyes now, something that promised he would never want to ride far, or long, from the sight of Deirdre.

The Schoolmaster was sure of that. For a moment he saw the girl's averted face, the curve of her white neck, the little tendrils of hair clustering moist and jetty about her ears, her scarlet fluttering lips, as Conal might have seen them.

"She's a beautiful woman—Deirdre."

An uneasily-moving voice jerked suddenly behind him with sly, chuckling laughter.

It was Thad McNab who spoke.

He grudged Mrs. Hegarty her gathering of young people and the patronage of Pat Glynn, but then she was able to run the place better than he, and although it was supposed to be her property, none knew better than the two of them that it was his as much as the Black Bull.

McNab came and stood in Mrs. Mary Ann's doorway sometimes when there was dancing, and the joy of several of the dancers was quenched at the mere sight of his shrivelled yellow face and pale eyes.

The Schoolmaster looked down at him. No man could afford to quarrel with McNab.

"How old will she be now?" asked McNab.

"Eighteen," replied the Schoolmaster.

"She's the prettiest girl ever seen down this part of the world," muttered old Salt Watson.

"Conal seems to think so."

It was Johnnie M'Laughlin who laughed.

"And who's Conal to think so? Isn't any girl on the roads good enough for him to play the fool to?" asked McNab, waspishly.

"Best not let him hear you say so, Thad."

McNab shook his shoulders.

"I'm not frightened of Conal. The rest of ye may be."

"Still you wouldn't like that fist of his about you, Thad," Salt Watson murmured, "and Conal isn't what y' might call a respecter of persons when he's roused."

The Schoolmaster went into the dance-room. He crossed it in leisurely fashion and went to Jessie. She was sitting staring before her, a mist of tears dimming her pretty eyes.

He did not go near Deirdre, did not look at her even. But Conal dropped her hand when the Schoolmaster came into the room, and a faint bird-like fear that had fluttered in Deirdre's eyes vanished.

A little later she came to him with a breath that was almost a sob.

"Can't we go now?" she said.

Looking into her eyes he saw the shine of tears in them. He had meant to talk very seriously to her on their way from Mrs. Hegarty's; but now she demanded tenderness and not reproof. She seemed to have stumbled against something she did not understand. She had dropped her armour of gaiety—all her shy, bright glances, smiles, sighs and little airs and graces. She had been playing with these women's weapons and had wearied of them, or perhaps she was surprised at their power, and troubled by it, he thought. There was a hurt expression he had never seen before in her eyes. She looked very young and tired.

He wrapped her up in her shawl, took her by the arm, and they went out into the moonlight together, making their way to the Black Bull, where they were staying until they could find another home in the district.

CHAPTER XXI

In the Wirree, Farrel was never known as anything but the Schoolmaster. Everybody called him that—even Deirdre when she spoke of him.

They had gone to live in a cottage on the outskirts of the township. The Schoolmaster had taken up his old trade, though it was understood he had been droving with Conal for Maitland the greater part of the time he had been away. Deirdre had wandered with him wherever he went, and it was on her account he was anxious to get back to steadier and more settled ways of life, it was said. Before long two or three of the brown-skinned Wirree children were trotting to the cottage for lessons every day.

The south had heard a great deal of Sam Maitland, head of the well-known firm of Maitland & Co., stock-dealers, of Cooburra, New South Wales.

There had been a bad season in the north-west for a couple of years. Maitland had bought up poor beasts and sent them to fatten in the south. Conal had been driving them through Wirreeford at intervals of two or three months, taking the fattened beasts back on the return journey over the border after he brought down the starvers.

All the week the township slept peacefully in the spring sunshine. When a clear, young moon came up over the plains in the evenings, it drenched them with wan, silver light.

But on Friday morning at dawn, the cattle came pouring into the town, with a cracking of whips, barking of dogs, yelling and shouting of men and boys. With a rush and a rattling of horns, they charged along between the rows of huddled houses, swinging from one side to the other of the track, wild and fearful-eyed, with lowered heads, long strings of glistening saliva dripping from their mouths. They seemed to be searching for the opportunity to break and head out to the hills again; But ringed with cracking whips, brushing horses, snapping dogs, they were turned into the sale-yards.

The one street of Wirreeford had been cobbled for some distance on either side of the sale-yards because the cattle and horses made a sea of mud about them when the spring rains had soaked into the soft earth. The stores and shanties were full on sale days.

Drovers, rough-haired, hawk-eyed men, with faces seared and seamed with the dust of the roads, hands burnt, and broken with barcoo, slouched along the streets, or stood watching their cattle, yarning in desultory fashion, leaning over the rails of the drafting yards. They smoked, or chewed and spat, in front of the shanties, and at night sprawled over the table at the Black Bull, playing cards or tossing dice.

A mob that had travelled a long way was often yarded the night before the sales. When the selling for the day was over, the beasts that had come down from the hills were driven out along the Rane road, and got under Way for the northern markets; but sometimes they were left in the yards, lowing and bellowing all night, while the stockmen who were going to take charge of them spent the evening at the Black Bull, or Mrs. Mary Ann's.

The township was full of the smell of cattle and dogs, and of the muddy, slowly-moving river that had become a waste-butt for the houses.

In the early spring, breezes from the ocean with a tang of salt in them blew right through the houses, and later, when the trees by the river blossomed, and bore masses of golden down, a warm, sweet, musky fragrance was wafted to their very doors. It overlaid the reek of the cattle yards, the fumes of rank spirits and tobacco that came from the shanties. And in the long glimmering twilights when the light faded slowly from the plains and the wall of the hills changed from purple to blue and misty grey, they were caught up into the mysterious darkness of the night—those perfumes of the lightwood and wattle trees in blossom—and rested like a benediction in the air.

From their shabby, whitewashed wattle-and-dab hut on the outskirts of the town the Schoolmaster and Deirdre could watch the twilight dying on the plains and breathe all the fragrance of the trees by the river when they were in bloom. The plains spread in vivid, undulating green before the cottage to the distant line of the hills, and the grass was full of wild flowers, all manner of tiny, shy, and starry, blue, and white, and yellow flowers.

Deirdre had watched Davey bring cattle down from the hills across the plains. She had seen him riding off runaways. Once a heifer had broken and careered over the plains before the cottage. Davey had chased after her at breakneck speed, and, rising in his stirrups, had swept his stock-whip round her, letting it fall on her plushy hide with ripping cracks. He had flogged the beast, driving her with strings of oaths, his dog, a black and tan fury, yelping and snapping at her nozzle, until the blood streamed from it, and with a mutinous bellow she turned back to the mob again.

Deirdre had watched him going home in the evening with his father, or some of Cameron's men, at the heels of a mob, his eyes going straight out before him. He never looked her way or seemed to see her where she stood, at the gate of the whitewashed cottage within a hundred yards of the river.

She had been chasing Mrs. Mary Ann's geese from the river across the green paddock that lay between the shanty and the Schoolmaster's house, when Davey rode out of the township towards her, one evening. He was driving a score or so of weedy, straggling calves.

Deirdre stood by the roadside and waited for him, her eyes luminous in the dusk. The wind had whipped her hair to the long tendrils it used to hang in when they raced each other along the roads from school.

"Davey!" she called, as he came towards her.

There was appeal in her voice.

But Davey stared at her as though he had not seen her, and passed on.

"You're a rude, horrible boy! And I hate you, hate you, hate you!" she cried passionately after him.

When they met again it was near the sale-yards, when the street was thronged with people from the hills. She had seen his horse hitched to the posts outside McNab's, and so was ready for him when they passed. The path was so narrow that they could not avoid brushing. But Deirdre's chin was well up and her eyes very steady when they met his under his hat brim. Such gloomy, morose eyes they were that she looked into. She almost exclaimed with surprise at them. Her mouth opened to speak. But Davey was as intent on passing as she had been. His face had an ugly, sullen look, something of his father's dourness. After he had passed she stood still and watched him.

He crossed the road and went into the Black Bull.

The Schoolmaster saw him there in the evening. It was not often Farrel was seen in the tap-room of the Black Bull, though there was always a lighting of eyes, a shifting of seats in anticipation of a lively evening when he appeared. He wondered what Davey Cameron was doing there. His father had been crippled with rheumatism for a couple of weeks and Davey had charge of his business. Farrel wondered if he had begun to swagger, to give himself airs on the strength of it.

He seemed on good terms with McNab and most of the men in the bar, but his acknowledgment of Dan's greeting was off-hand and he went soon after Farrel came in.

The Schoolmaster's eyes met McNab's; but McNab's eyes never met any man's for very long. Perhaps he was afraid of the inner man a stranger might get glimpse of, afraid to let any one else see in his eyes the secrets of that sly, spying soul of his.