It was Nuggan's pride to think that Birralong had never been in want of any information on any subject after reference had been made to him. It was therefore bitter to hear his latest version of the last local problem airily dismissed as a fairy tale.

"You've got no call to criticize," he went on, as Tony did not answer. "If you want to know, I can tell you; and there's a heap of things you'd give your head to know now, I take it. I've heard many a tale I don't repeat, and I could make most people look rather foolish if I wanted to. When you go out to the Flat next time just ask who Mrs. Garry was. Talk about my fairy tales! Take care you ain't one yourself. Maybe Yaller-head could give you news about it if she wanted to. Only she don't, now she's got young Dickson. There ain't no mystery about where he came from."

He was indignant at the calling in question of his word, and as he smarted himself, so did he try to make Tony smart. It was true that he used his eyes, and little escaped them; he might have added that he also used his imagination, and that what escaped the one was secured, always, by the other. He fell back as he concluded, in case Tony should score in return; but as the procession had reached the Rest, Tony swallowed the unpleasant effect of Nuggan's words, and, having turned his horse into the paddock by the side of the hotel, entered with the others the room where, on his last visit, the great billiard-match had been played.

As on that former occasion the news spread that there was money to be spent at the Rest, so it did on this occasion, and long before sunset there was a mighty gathering to do honour to the men who, having lost one pile, had set out again and won another. The drought still lay over Birralong, the rain which had caused such fortunate unpleasantness to Tony and his mates having apparently only fallen on the heights of the range. For many miles around the township the grass was brown and withered, only waiting for a stray spark to set it ablaze and sweep the country with a greater desolation than even the drought could effect. The stock on the selections was thin and poor, the horses were weedy and weak, and the selectors, hearing that Tony and his mates had returned with more gold, hurried into the Rest to hear what they could in the hopes of sharing in the miners' luck. To profit by any good-will there might be, men who were weary with counting their debts and discounting the chances of paying them, kept the ball rolling by "setting 'em up" when they thought it came to their turn, despite the repeated assertion by Tony and his two comrades that they were providing the evening's entertainment.

The sun went down, and the cool, dark evening reigned outside, but within the Rest the gathering was growing uproarious as the selectors gave free vent to spirits held in check for many weeks by the depressing weight of the unending drought. A commotion among the horses which were in the paddock beside the hotel, and on to which the room looked out, gave a moment's pause to the noise within. One man went out to see what had caused the stir. He dashed back into the room with a white, scared face and startled eyes.

"Marmot's store's afire!" he shouted.

Helter-skelter the men rushed out, Tony and his mates in front. On the rise at the end of the township the flames gleamed as they flared from the wooden building, which burned like matchwood. From the distance in the opposite direction came the sounds of horses, galloping away from the township.

Peters sprang towards the paddock fence.

"Our gold!" he yelled. "They've biffed us!"

The slip-rails In the paddock fence were down, and two of the horses were missing. While most of the men rushed away up to the burning store, five stayed behind—Tony, Peters, Murray, and two young selectors who had come in to join the fun.

"It's a tough ride. Who knows the country best?" Peters asked, as he swung into the saddle.

"Teddy Morton," some one answered shortly; and the selector named, slim, active, and sunburned, wheeled his horse to the front without a word and drove his spurs home.

Out along the road he raced, sitting tight in the saddle with the reins hanging loose, catching rather than hearing on the air as it rushed past his ears the thud of the horses' hoofs galloping away ahead. Behind him the others rode, silent, the horses following the leader of their own instincts. Two miles farther on the faint sounds ahead ceased, and each one of the five knew that the fugitives had turned from the roadway into the open bush. They knew the place—there was rugged, broken country a mile from the road, deep cross gullies with treacherous banks, and patches of wattle scrub close-growing and dark, where a man might ride to his death at every stride of his horse. And down the road they raced, till they saw by the loom of the open bush where the boundary fences ceased. The leader turned his horse in his stride, and the four behind turned theirs. A fallen log; a rut; a snag; and one rider's race would be done; for the pace they were going left no escape if once a horse came down. Through the low-grown brush they crashed. A rider ducked to miss a branch that was level with his head; a horse swerved sharp to the right to dodge an old and charred tree-stump; another propped as it caught its step to clear a fancied jump—and the riders gripped their saddle-pads and rode with their hands low down. Somewhere ahead their quarry raced—and three of them thought of their gold—somewhere ahead their coming was heard, and murder might lurk in the shade. It might be a bullet; it might be a spear; it might be a shattered spine; but Morton stuck to his racing lead, and the four pressed close behind.

Away ahead three others rode, two on stolen mounts. They had seen the gleam of the fire burst out as they galloped past the Rest; they heard the shouts of the laughter, and they laughed as they rode away, for they had robbed the store and set it on fire, and every man of the township was in at the Rest drinking to the success of the diggers whose gold was being carried off. They had no plans beyond the robbing of the store, and now, as it was necessary to divide the spoil, they made for the broken country so as to be able to carry the division through without fear of interruption. The man who was on his own horse had the gold strapped in front of him; the others were one on each side, watchful lest he should slip away with the prize. The man on the left watched his companion so carefully that he failed to see a sudden break-away of the ground. His horse stumbled, and its rider was jerked forward out of the saddle on to its neck. The noise startled the horse in the middle, and it swung on one side just at the edge of the break-away. Before it could check itself, it slipped, and the effort made to recover carried it over the edge, causing it to fall heavily on its side and on its rider. The scream of the horse and the yell of the rider echoed through the bush. The man's companions reined in their horses, and one of them dismounted.

"Make a blaze of twigs if you can't see," the one who remained in the saddle called out, and, to help, he also alighted.

The gleam of yellow light when it sprang up revealed the horse lying with a jagged stump through it, and beyond it the rider, with one leg twisted and bent up under him. One of the two went over and stooped down, taking the man by his shoulders and pulling him along the ground till his leg was straight, when he let him fall again. The man groaned as his back came heavily against the ground.

"Listen!" the other exclaimed, as he stood up. "They're after us. Collar the gold and clear."

He sprang to where the injured horse was impaled, and tugged at the straps that held the bags. His companion came to his assistance.

"Hold the horses, you fool! Be ready to ride for it."

The straps were loose by the time the other man was in his saddle, with the reins of the second horse on his arm.

"Here!" the first exclaimed as he rushed up with the bags in his arm. "Take them quick."

The second man took them, and let go the reins, which the other seized.

"Tap! My God, Tap, you're not——"

The man addressed turned savagely with an ugly oath.

"It's the mare. Kill the mare before you go. She's hurt, bad," the injured man groaned.

Tap scrambled into the saddle.

"Here, where's my share?" he cried to his companion.

The other spurred his horse.

"Ride for it," he called back, as he dashed into the shadow ahead; and at the same moment the sounds of the others crashing through the bush behind them came to Tap's ears.

"Don't leave the mare—think of the pain she's in," the man on the ground cried out, as he strove to rise, and fell back, writhing in agony.

The sound of Tap's horse galloping away came to him with the sounds of others approaching. The light from the little fire Tap had made was just enough to show where the five pursuers reined up in time to miss the sudden drop in the ground. The man's eyes gleamed as he saw them, and he tried to pull out a revolver.

"Morton and I'll ride on; fix him up and follow," Peters shouted, as Murray, having dismounted, rushed across and seized the man's hand.

While Murray took the revolver from the man's pocket, the young selector threw enough twigs on the fire to make it blaze up brightly. Tony, noticing the state of the impaled mare, cried out—

"Poor brute! Here, lend me that pistol, Murray, till I put it out of misery."

The gleaming eyes of the injured man followed him as he went over to the mare and ended its agony. Murray stooped and tried to move him into a more easy position, and only then did the gleaming eyes leave Tony's face.

"Damn you!" he said, as he looked up for a moment at Murray.



CHAPTER XVIII.

A TANGLED SKEIN.

The man with the broken thigh lay still on the rough-made stretcher the men had put up for him before starting, and Tony, sitting on the other side of the fire, smoked in silence, not moving arm or leg lest by so doing he should attract the attention of the sufferer and so disturb him. For the same reason he did not replenish the fire, now burning down to a glowing mass of embers, which threw out a dull red glare and fell upon the form of the man where he lay, wrapped in a blanket, and played weird tricks of shade with the grizzly beard and the unkempt locks that strayed across the forehead.

Viewed either by firelight or sunlight, it was not a face to hold the glance, nor to call for a second look, unless the mind were morbid and animated by a love for the grotesque and devilish. Not even the unsteady, deceptive glare of the ember light, throwing streaks and patches of shade, ever changing and ever moving, across the ragged surface of the beard, could hide the square massiveness of the jaws and the curve of the hard yet sensuous lips. There was strength in the nose, strength and cruelty, and the straight black band that formed the heavy brow added to the repellent expression. Such a face it was that, looking at it, one understood the man turning with an oath upon those who sought to aid him in his misery, much as one can understand the fury of an imprisoned snake which turns back upon itself and plunges its fangs into its own flesh until it dies, the victim of its own malicious instincts.

As Tony sat watching, the sufferer turned his head from side to side languidly, and a moan of pain escaped his lips. Tony rose to his feet, gently, and the man, opening his eyes, looked at him. At once the expression of pain that was in them as the lids rolled up gave way to a flash of hate.

"You—damn you!" the man muttered, as he set his teeth.

Tony stepped across to the stretcher and stooped down.

"Don't touch me," the man exclaimed fiercely.

"All right, old chap, I won't hurt you; only I thought I might make you more comfortable," Tony answered.

"You want to make me comfortable?" the man asked in a scoffing tone.

"Why, yes, if I can," Tony replied.

"Then see here," the man exclaimed. "I've never feared anything yet, and I don't begin now. I'm close up a dead 'un, but that's nothing. When I'm dead, I'm gone, and that's all about it. I know, and I don't give a shearer's curse for it, so don't you fancy I care. It's your maudlin gospel-millers who get scared at the chance of kicking. You understand? That's the sort of man I am. I was never afraid and never sorry all my days, and I'm not going to begin now at the end of them."

His eyes were wild in their gleam and his lips twitched as he spoke.

"Yes; that's all right," Tony said soothingly. "You're as plucky as they make them, and I like you for it; so go slow and rest, because there aren't too many like you, and we don't want you to go."

The keen, bright eyes looked steadily for a moment, and then a forced laugh came from the man's lips.

"You don't want me to go!" he said, with a sneer. "You! Well, see here, young fellow. There's one thing I'd be sorry for—if I went without telling you what I've got to say."

"Keep it till the morning," Tony answered.

The man laughed again.

"I shall be fit for planting hours before the morning. You listen while you may. You'll be interested. Make the fire up, and sit down where you were. Then I'll talk—and don't interrupt, because I'm pushed for time."

To humour him, Tony threw some logs on the fire, and sat down again in his old place; and the man lay with his face turned towards him, the ruddy firelight shedding a brighter glow upon the unkempt hair and beard, and making the gleam of the eyes more vivid.

"I'll tell you the yarn like a story-book," the man began. "Once upon a time, there was a woman and two men."

Tony, sitting on the other side of the fire, leaned forward to reach a burning ember with which to light his pipe, and carelessly puffed at it, while the man stopped talking, and watched him with a look that was fiendish in its expression of hate.

"There's no damned interest about this yarn for you, I suppose," he said harshly, raising his head slightly from the rolled coat, which did duty for a pillow, and letting it fall again as his mouth contracted with the pain the movement caused him. "Well, the woman's your mother. Now go on smoking," he added, with savage emphasis.

Tony looked round quickly.

"Yes; you're waking up now," the man sneered. "I reckon you'll be interested now."

"How—what do you know——"

"You'll learn what I know when I've told you. Hold your jaw and keep your ears open. I've not much time to tell you, and I'd be sorry to go without finishing."

"Go on," Tony said quietly; "I shall not interrupt you."

The gleam in the eyes satisfied him that it was only delirium in the man's mind; there was only a coincidence in the fact that he spoke of what Nuggan had hinted at, and what lay nearest to Tony's heart—the question of his parentage and the dissimilarity between himself and the other members of the Taylor family.

"I knew you in a moment, knew you by the likeness," the man went on. "She don't know where you are, but she thinks of me still—me, the man who——but that ain't part of this yarn. The woman—your mother—was married, but she's separated from her husband for many years. Separated, I said, sonny. Separated's good, though you don't know it;" and he laughed unmusically as he watched the set face Tony had turned towards him.

"There were two men and one woman, and the woman was married to one of them, but they both were mad with love for her and mad with hate for each other. Do you know what hate means, you white-faced boy? Do you know what it is to hate a man so that you'd go through hell to grip him by the throat and feel him choking under your hands; so that you'd tear your own heart out twenty times a day to grind his infernal life into grey damnation? Do you know what it's like to hate, waking and sleeping, drunk or sober, always having one object in front of you that you want to reach and kill? Do you? Then you know what I've felt for years and years, day and night; what I've lived for, longed for, worked for."

The eyes that had gleamed before were blazing as though some of the glowing embers had been taken from the fire and placed in the man's head, and the face glistened with sweat as the muscles worked and quivered under the paroxysm of fury that held him.

"That's enough," Tony exclaimed, jumping up.

The man held up his hand.

"You've got to hear it, all of it, and then find her out and tell her—from me who's dying. If you don't take a dying man's message to your own mother——"

He stopped and looked at Tony, his face growing calmer the while.

"If you get excited like that——" Tony began.

"Don't you be afraid," the man answered quickly. "I'll finish the yarn or there won't be time. One of the two men married the woman, and one of the two men swore for vengeance, either on the man, or the woman, or both. And he had it. How? That's what I'll tell you. The yarn don't amuse you, sonny? You want waking up again? Well, one thing he did was to steal the kid."

He stopped again, watching Tony's face closely.

"Yes; go on," Tony said quietly.

"It near broke the mother's heart when she found it out," he continued, speaking maliciously—"near broke her heart. But she never found it, for it was put right out of sight; it was left at a humpy at a place called Taylor's Flat."

He watched Tony narrowly as he spoke, and laughed harshly as he saw him swing round and leap to his feet.

"Now you're interested," he said.

Tony stood looking at him, unable for the moment to find words to express what he felt. Was the coincidence of a delirium-stricken mind still the explanation of the man's striking at the tenderest spot in his heart? If so, it was as nothing; but if not——

"Who are you that you should know this?" Tony cried, moving towards the man where he lay with his eyes, bright as stars and cruel as a snake's, fixed upon him.

"You listen to my yarn. That's your contract," he said derisively. "You'll live till to-morrow; I shan't. Are you going to cheat a dying man? Let me talk. You can fill in the rest about the kid to suit your own taste, and I'll——"

"You were the man who stole the child; you were the mean——"

"Was I?" interrupted the man. "You wait and hear. The man who stole the kid—you, if you want to be exact, damn you, now you've come to see me die—that man went back to the—the place where he stole the kid and where he met—your father."

Again he sought to raise his head as he uttered the words in short, sharp tones, his face growing wet and ghastly under the influence of his pain and his hatred. Tony, watching him, said nothing; the man was either mad or lying, and whichever it was, the best thing to do was to keep quiet and say nothing.

"He came back for fresh mischief, and I—there, you know now—I met him," he shouted; and Tony, keeping still, stood looking at him calmly. "I waited for him out on the run," he went on, beginning to speak in jerky spasms of words, as though he needed to rest every few seconds if he would keep his energy enough in hand to last him till he finished his story. "He had been rounding up some cattle, and had a stock-whip with him. I had one, too, a beauty, with a sixteen-foot green-hide thong. I knew him as soon as I saw him half a mile away. I skulked in the scrub as he came up—just behind a clump of wattle. To fool him I rode out and past him; he turned after me, and I wheeled."



The bright eyes glittered as they watched Tony's face.

"You're a fly young chap," he went on, "but you're not fly enough to guess what's coming. A couple of miles from where we were a track ran through a thickly timbered part of the run. It was a winding track, and not too wide. At one of the narrowest bits, just in the middle of a curve, an old dead gum had stood for years. I had gone over that track just an hour or so before, and I saw where that big gum had fallen—lying right up the track. It was a red gum, tough, long-limbed, and sun-dried. When it fell it had splintered lumps off the limbs, making them sharp at the ends, which were pointing up the track like the prongs of a great jagged toasting-fork. Ha, sonny, what a throw-in for me! Here was a game worth playing. I rode at the man I hated, loosening my stock-whip, and as I came near him, I turned aside and sent out the lash—so as not to touch him. The crack of it sounded in his ears and in his horse's as well, and the beast began to plunge. Here was my chance, and I took it. As the horse reared and plunged, I waited till it was facing away from me, and then sent the lash fair on to its flanks. It brought a lump out of the brute, for the green-hide was as hard as nails, and that horse set off straight for the track where the dead gum lay, and with me after it. Through the bush it went, racing like mad, with its flanks dripping red as I landed blow after blow with the good old green-hide. Soon it was on the track, racing, galloping, blindly, madly, like hell out for an airing, straight for my toasting-fork, straight—God!"

In the fury and excitement of his story the man had forgotten his injuries, and to give emphasis to his words, and perhaps make the pale, set face that was turned towards him grow paler and more set, he had reached out his arms, and held his clutching fingers towards Tony as he sought to rise and peer with his vengeful eyes nearer and closer to his victim, till the pangs of agony cut short both his fury and his invective. He fell back, his lips pressed together till they were thin and white, and his fists clenched as he strove to battle with the jarring torture in his nerves. The sweat stood out in glistening beads on his forehead, and his brows contracted down until they almost hid the eyes in the frown of determined will.

The mute agony of the man's face sent back the disgust which was growing in Tony's heart. The tale might be a lie—it might be only delirium; but the man was in agony, in the death-agony perhaps, and Tony went to his side.

"What can I do to help you?" he asked, as gently as he could.

"Pull the damned leg down—it's shifted," the man muttered between his clenched teeth; and Tony did as he asked.

The man lay still with closed eyes for a few moments without heeding Tony's query whether he was easier. Then he raised his eyelids, and, with a short, forced laugh, turned his head on one side.

"I'm going to finish the yarn," he said in a voice that was strained, but in marked contrast to the one he had previously used.

"Never mind the yarn; lie quiet for a bit," Tony exclaimed.

"I'll finish the yarn," the man replied, with a touch of his old fierceness in his voice. "Where was I when the damned bone moved? I remember. We were riding for the jump, riding as I never rode before or since, riding like—like——I wonder if they ride in hell? If they do they can't ride wilder, for I cut that horse's flanks to ribbons—yes, cut it till the bone showed through—and it fled down that winding track so fast that I was left behind. It went out of sight, it and its rider, round the bend where the red gum lay. Ha, sonny, I wasn't first in, but I won that race. There was a shout and a shriek from man and horse, and then a crash of shattered timber, and when I rode up at a hand-gallop, I saw on my toasting-fork, stuck with a jagged prong through him, his head hanging down and his legs flying up, just as he had pitched from his horse, the man your mother loved."

The venom had come into the voice again, the hatred into the eyes; and as he uttered the last words, Tony instinctively drew back farther away from him, his whole nature recoiling in loathing from the cruel, brutal passion of the man's face.

"That's what you're to tell her; that's my message to her when you find her—my dying message to the woman who made me mad with love and mad with hate. And you'll give it to her—you, her stolen boy, and when she hears it from you, she——"

His voice stopped in a gasp, and for a minute he battled for his breath.

"I don't care now; I'm square at last," he muttered, as soon as he could speak again; and Tony saw by the red firelight how his face was growing pallid and drawn. "I was square with the mother years ago and square with the man she loved, and now I'm square with you; for I've put a sting in your life that'll last as long as you've breath to draw. I came back here to find you; and then—I am the man who collared the gold last time you were here, and I settled your hash with the fair-haired girl that's out at the station now. You've your father's voice and your father's face, and if your mother could see you she'd know in a moment—only she can't, she can't; and you——"

A gasping spasm seized the man, and he battled again for his breath. Tony sprang across to him, and, stooping down, put his hand under the man's head and raised it. He breathed more easily, and Tony watched the face anxiously, for the eyes were closed and the lips drawn away from the teeth. With his unoccupied hand Tony put back the shaggy mass of hair from the forehead, and, as he felt the touch, the man opened his eyes and stared vindictively at the face above him.

"You thought I'd gone—did you?" he said, in little more than a whisper. "Don't touch me—you spawn of——"

A spasm of pain contracted his features and stopped his words.

"Don't talk like that. Keep quiet. I only want to do what I can to ease you," Tony said gently.

The man, even as he struggled for breath, raised one arm and tried to push Tony away, until, fearing that his efforts to soothe him might only do more harm than good, Tony let the head lie on the pillow again and stood back. The man's chest moved as the gasping struggles for breath sounded hard and grating in his throat, and his frame trembled as it lay. Presently he opened his eyes again and looked at Tony.

"Tell your—mother when you—find her how——"

Another spasm interrupted him, and Tony stepped nearer, for the voice was terribly low. When the worst of the spasm was over, he went on, the words scarcely audible—

"How your—father—died."

The eyes, still full of hatred though they were growing lustreless and dull, were fixed on Tony's face with a blinkless stare. The distorted lips moved twice without any sound coming from them. Then the chin fell; the glazing eyes turned up from their stare on Tony's face, up to the dark starlit vault overhead; a wavering sigh came as it were on the silent air of the night—and the unknown was dead.

For a time Tony stood looking down at him as he lay, the face, never beautiful, growing more hideous every second with the muscles setting rigid in the last expression of savage hate. The fire softly hissed and crackled as the burning logs flaked into ashes, and beyond the range of the ruddy light the bush formed a deep, impenetrable gloom, darker and more sombre than the deep blue of the moonless sky. The faint wind of night, scarcely perceptible to the senses save by the soft whispering rustle of the foliage, brought no other sound with it. All was still and silent, and Tony, as he stood, felt as a man will sometimes feel when he stands on a silent night in the great immensity of the Australian bush—as though he were something which had no material existence save the consciousness of the moment, and even that were an intrusion on the sublime calm of untrammelled, sleeping nature.

Then, as with the fury of a thunder-peal, there crashed in upon his half-numbed mind the significance of all that he had just seen and heard. The hate the man had shown him; the story of that ghastly revenge; the message he had scoffingly told him to take to his mother,—all returned to him in a moment, blended, as it were, with the hints Nuggan had thrown out, and the suspicion that had often been in his own mind.

The man had spoken of Ailleen; he had claimed the robbery from Leary's hut; he had boasted how he had stolen the child from its mother and left it at Taylor's Flat—and Nuggan had told him to ask next time he was at the Flat who Mrs. Garry was and what she could tell. Nuggan, too, had taunted him with the change in Ailleen's manner and the reason for it—the reason this man had named—the mystery surrounding his birth.

His eyes turned again upon the silent form on the stretcher, with the horribly distorted features and the face moulded in an expression of merciless hate and cruelty.

Mechanically he approached and pulled the end of the blanket over the staring face. With a shudder he turned away, and walked back to his seat by the fire. He was sitting there when, an hour later, Peters and Morton rode up with a led horse, walking lame, between them.

"Our man was thrown and dodged us in the bush," Peters said as he came up. "But we collared the horse and the gold. Murray and his mate are after the other. Hullo!" he broke off, as he glanced over at the figure under the blanket. "Has he gone?"

Tony nodded.

"Well, I hope the others have too—the mean sneak thieves!" Peters exclaimed.

"We'd have lynched them if we'd caught them," Morton added.



CHAPTER XIX.

STRANDS IN THE COIL.

Stripped to the waist, in the reek and grime of smoke and sweat, the men who rushed to the burning store fought with the flames till the dawn.

The country was parched with the drought, and the grass was as dry as hay; the fences would blaze in long lines of flame if once they were alight; the standing trees with their drooping leaves were full of oily sap, and if once the fire reached the open bush, it would sweep for a hundred miles. And each man knew what that would mean; each man knew how the flames would roar as they leapt from tree to tree; each man knew how the fire would glare as it caught the sun-dried grass; how overhead, and a mile in front, the whirling columns of smoke would roll, choking, smothering, blinding, till the blood-red glare showed fierce behind, and everything with life had fled, or stayed and swelled the ashes, on the desolate, blackened track.

The store was burned to a heap of cinders with all its contents, for the men let it burn, having no water to throw on it, and no time to use the water even if the tanks had all been full. It was not to save the store that they fought; it was not to put the fire out that they toiled and battled through the night. It was to keep the fire from spreading; to stamp it out as it ran, in long snake-like lines, licking up the withered grass; to beat it out as it flamed along the fences; or to hold it as it blazed out in a raging fury where a spark fell upon the inflammable foliage of the gums. Boughs stripped from saplings; sacks tied to long, thin sticks; even the coats off their backs,—were the weapons used in the fight; for unless the enemy were defeated at the outset, a smoking waste of charred desolation would be all that there was of Birralong and the district when again the sun came up.

But the fight was won, and when dawn came it only showed the heap of wood ash and twisted sheets of galvanized iron—which was all that remained of Marmot's store—and streaks of black running out into the paddock beyond and along the fences, with now and again a tree either leafless and charred, or with the leaves brown and scorched, showing where the fire had for a moment obtained a footing and striven to gain a hold, from whence it could spread in every direction, to reap, with its sickles of flame, the rich harvest in a wild, unrestrained orgy and blast, not only Nature's, but man's, handiwork into a dreary sadness of blackened desolation. The men, having won, went back to the Rest, with their throats parched and aching, their eyes smarting from the smoke and the dust, and their skins grimed and clammy.

"It's a bad job for me," Marmot exclaimed, when, with the trouble in their throats removed, the men reassembled at the Rest, where Peters and Tony and Morton had already returned; "it's a bad job for me, but it's nothing to what would have been if the blaze had got away. A bush fire in the district now would be ruin, black, staring ruin, to every one, and death to many."

"Ay, that it would," a selector, from ten miles out, answered. "It's what we are all afraid of now. A bush fire with the country like it is would go over five hundred square miles, and there wouldn't be a selector nor a squatter for miles round with a yard of fence nor a blade of grass to call his own."

"That's true," Marmot said. "And it's why I feel glad we held it. Though it's bad enough for me, for it leaves me a poor man."

"Not much," Peters exclaimed. "You're all right. You set us up with stores when we were broke, and now we've the chance we'll see you through."

"Seeing that the gold we brought in was probably the cause of all the trouble," Tony said.

"I don't know, lad; I don't know," Marmot replied. "How could any one but us know it was there?"

"Yes; how could they?" Peters echoed. "Only they did. We'll find out how later on. Meanwhile, one is settled—and Leary swears he's the man that tied him up before—while of the other two, one we know had a bad tumble, because we found where he took the ground, and found his horse lamed and with the gold still on its back. I'll bet that the chap carries marks enough about him to give his game away, even if he can travel all right."

"What about the other?" some one asked.

"He flung the gold away so as to get a lead on Murray and his mate—at least, so Murray said when he came in with the stuff," Peters answered.

Privately he had whispered to Tony an ugly suspicion he had—a suspicion which did not tend for peace of mind, for it was that Murray had in some way been in league with the men who had robbed and fired the store. That was a further irritant, for Tony remembered only too clearly the state of Murray's horse when he and Peters rode up to Marmot's, as well as the uneasiness in Murray's manner when they asked him who he had told of their return. Coming on the top of the other circumstances, it reduced Tony to a condition of suspecting every one and everything; so he took the first opportunity to ride away to the Flat—to test the greatest of the mysteries first.

Riding slowly, he reached the Flat about noon, his mind brooding over the perplexities which had crowded upon him since his return to Birralong, and his spirits depressed by the mingled doubts that had come to him since he had had time to realize something of the meaning of the story he had heard.

At first he had tried to dismiss it from his mind altogether, telling himself that it was only the ravings of a man delirious at the point of death. But the knowledge that the man had displayed as to incidents and interests in his life, and, above all, the significant hints Nuggan had uttered, all helped to keep his attention on it.

As he approached the boundary fence of the selection where it first touched the road, he caught sight of Taylor, and coo-eed to him. The elder man came towards him as soon as he saw who it was, and Tony dismounted and stood by the fence till he came up.

"Why, Tony, lad, back again? And what luck this time? Did you strike——"

"I want to ask you something," Tony said seriously; and Taylor stopped and looked at him.

"Why, what's wrong with you, Tony?" he asked. "You look as though—well, I don't quite know how. You haven't had fever, or a touch of the sun, or a——"

"No," Tony said, "I haven't. But I've heard something, and I——"

"Ah!" Taylor exclaimed. His wife had been expressing her views strongly and plainly to him as the weeks went by without any signs of Tony's return, while rumour was busy with the names of Ailleen and Dickson. "I understand, lad. You come along and see your mother. She's got it all off by heart, and will talk to you about it. She'll tell you all you want to know, and more besides."

"I want to hear it from you," Tony answered.

"There's mighty little I can tell you. It's all mixed up to me. It wasn't that way with your mother and me. It was straight out dealing; no side-tracks and cross-tracks. We started right off the reel. I said to her——"

"Who is my mother?"

The question, the tone, the expression of his face and the look in his eyes, made Taylor stare at Tony, speechless for the moment. The question was so unexpected; it brought such a flood of memory into the man's mind that his slow, heavy wits stood still, and he could only stand staring and gaping at the alert young face.

"Who is my mother?" Tony repeated abruptly.

"Your mother? Why—what's come over you, lad? Your mother? Why—go on to the house and ask her," Taylor replied, the only idea which came to him being the idea to escape from the difficulty by passing it on to some one else. But he was not to escape so easily.

"Am I your son?" Tony asked.

"My son? Why—my son? Ain't your name Taylor? Ain't you always—what's up with you? Who's been—you haven't—what's put that in your head?"

Tony leaned his arms on the top rail of the fence and looked away across the paddock. It was a simple question to answer, he told himself—a simple question for this man above all others to answer; but instead of doing so, he hesitated and was confused.

"I've heard—something," he said quietly. Now that he was face to face with the mystery, he lost his irritation and impatience. It was all true, he told himself. There was something which had been kept from him; something which Ailleen had learned and resented; something which——"I've heard something," he repeated, checking his thoughts. "I came straight to you to ask if it were true. If it were not, you need not—you would have said so."

"I don't know what you've heard," Taylor said slowly. "I don't know, and I don't care; for I ain't a man to catch an idea quick like. But I'll tell you this: you'd never have heard it from me—never. You'd have lived and died as you've been, just as if I'd been your father."

"Then you are not?" Tony exclaimed, turning on the man with a fierce earnestness.

"No, Tony, I ain't; but you'd never have heard it from me save this way. And now you know—well, it don't make no difference. You're just as you always have been—no more, no less. I'd never have told you, nor would your——" he stopped as he realized that the word which was on his tongue no longer applied.

"My—my mother," Tony said, with a different ring in his voice and a different look in his eyes.

"No, lad—no! 'Tain't that way," Taylor exclaimed warmly. "She's been your mother—and more maybe."

The dull wits for once acted quickly, and into Taylor's mind there came on the moment the memory of that night a score of years ago, when he saw his wife clutch the nameless babe and clasp it to her bosom, and the same fling of memory brought back also the building of the slim rail fence round the little mound in the corner of the paddock—the fence that was never without a trailing, flowering vine growing over it—and the dull, prosaic mind tried to understand something of the beauty and the glamour of it, but only grew more confused under the spell of unfamiliar emotion.

"You should have left it as it was, lad; you should have left it as it was," he mumbled. "Where's the good of stirring it up now? It's twenty years and more ago."

"It's now to me—now and always," Tony answered. "And I want to know it all—everything."

Taylor wondered. Should he tell the story in his own heavy fashion, or go and ask his wife to tell it? There was no sense in keeping it a secret any more now, but he remembered his wife's words of twenty years before, "No one shall take him from me; no one—never."

"We'll go and ask the missus," he said; and together they walked to the house, silent.

At the door Mrs. Taylor met them. Before she could speak Taylor interposed.

"He's heard something of the yarn, and wants to know the facts," he said; "so we came along to you."

Taking the remark to apply to what she herself had in her mind, Mrs. Taylor put her hand on Tony's arm and smiled.

"Why, there's nothing to fret about," she said. "It isn't your loss; it's hers, if she's that sort of girl. Let her please herself, I say; and if she's fool enough——"

"'Tain't that," Taylor exclaimed. "It's—that chap who came here years ago has been around, or the yarn has, and Tony's heard it, and wants——now then, here, hold up!" he broke off, as Mrs. Taylor, taken terribly aback, looked from one to the other with startled eyes.

"What right has he to talk—now?" she asked, with a return of the savage jealousy she had shown when, twenty years before, she thought the baby was to have been taken from her—the baby which was now the stalwart, handsome young bushman who was watching her with such winsome eyes. "Is that what's made her change, Tony?" she went on, resentment against the girl, whom she held to be responsible for Tony leaving the Flat, still uppermost in her mind.

"I don't know," he answered. "Last night Marmot's store was burned, after we had left our gold there, and the gold was stolen. We rode the thieves down. One of them was badly thrown and died. I stayed with him while the others went on, and he told me he knew me because I was like my—my father; and then he said he stole me as a baby and left me here. I wouldn't have believed it only Nuggan said there was something wrong, and then I made up my mind to come out and ask. What is the truth?"

"That's it," Taylor said. "A chap came here one night and said—said he was left with you, and we took you and kept you and brought you up like our own."

Mrs. Taylor, touching Tony on the arm, pointed to the vine-covered rail in the corner of the paddock.

"He'd just gone," she said sadly.

"And the chap never came back and never sent a word, and it was nobody's business—so we kept you as our own," Taylor added.

"And if that's why the girl——"

"There's more than that," Tony said. "If one part of the man's yarn is true, all of it may be. He said he'd killed my father, and then stole me in revenge on my mother; and he jeered me, dying as he was, and swore I'd never find her, though she was seeking for me now. I only thought he was raving then; I don't know now."

For a few moments there was silence between them.

"If he did that——" Mrs. Taylor began, and stopped.

Her memory turned back to the sorrow she had known when her firstborn went from her, when the aching void came into her life and robbed it of every joy and every zest, till the waif was brought to her, the care of whom filled her life with happiness and content. Her big motherly heart was trying to understand something of the anguish she would have known had that waif not come to her then; and she thought of the anguish that other mother must have known if the story she heard were true.

"I want to find her," Tony said simply.

Demonstrations of affection were unknown at Taylor's Flat—emotion has but slight influence in the prosaic life of the bush; but Mrs. Taylor flung her arms round Tony's neck, and held him closely to her as she kissed him. Then, as she released him and, looking up, caught her husband's glance, she exclaimed, "And you would too, Bill," as she pushed him, to hide the tears in her eyes.

The sound of a horse, furiously ridden, caused them to turn towards the road just as a rider dashed up to the slip-rails.

"There's a fire on Barellan run," he shouted. "We want all the help we can get."

Without waiting for an answer he dashed off out of sight, riding as hard as his horse would go to carry the warning and call for help to fight the common enemy.

"On Barellan!" Taylor exclaimed. "Why, the grass is a foot high there with no stock to keep it down. It'll be over the country if they don't check it. Ride for it, lad. Every man's wanted."

Tony needed no second bidding, and was in the saddle and off, riding hard for the scene of the conflict. As he rode past selections, the old hands were already preparing to protect their holdings by firing the grass and burning it for about ten yards on either side of the boundary fences, beating the flames out with boughs when they threatened to spread too far. It was a slow process and a dangerous one, for only small patches could be burned at a time, lest the small fire escaped past control and developed in an instant into a great blaze. The heavy white smoke rolled in clouds as each patch was set alight, enveloping the figures of the beaters, half hidden by the smoke and half revealed by the line of flame which ran so rapidly through the dry grass.

When Tony reached the township he found it practically deserted. The men who had struggled to stop the spread of the flames at Marmot's the night before were already away at the big blaze, the site of which was marked by a great column of smoke, rolling, whirling, and folding against the clear blue of the cloudless sky. On the air a faint haze was already drifting over the town, and with it came the pungent, aromatic scent of the burning eucalypts.

As he galloped through the bush the haze grew denser, the scent more pungent, the heat more intense, until he reached the fringe of the smoke, rolling along in heavy wreaths and clouds, and bearing with it a sound, inexplicable to those who have never heard it, unforgettable to those who have—a sound of a whispering roar, impressive and yet faint, sharp and yet dull, like the far-off roll of breaking surf and the rattle of rifle-shots. It told of a fire that was sweeping along through miles of grass with the rush of an incoming tide, leaping, flinging, dancing as it came, throwing up its columns of smoke, spark-laden and dense; sweeping in long lines of flame, reaching out like endless feelers from the great red demon behind; stretching out in thin streaks of glowing red, flameless till a dozen had spread in a network, laced and interlaced, in the dull buff hue of the grass, and a breath came out from the smoke and fanned them all to a blaze, and the flames sprang up with a roar, and leaping, rushed like a charging host when battle-cries rend the air, devouring everything, destroying everything, in the maddened swirl of heat. It told of standing timber bending before the wind which sprang to life in the fury of the blaze, while sheets of flame flung from tree to tree, hissing and roaring as they wrapped round the topmost boughs, and, while yet the stems were enshrouded in smoke, stripped off the leaves in a blazing shower, and tossed them far and wide, as though the game were a frolic and death were a laughing glee. It told of scorching blasts that rushed from the line of flame, shrivelling the leaves that were green to make them ripe for the havoc that was to come.

Shouts came to him from the smoke, telling him where the men were fighting, and he hastened forward. A dozen men dashed out of the gloom ahead, smoke-stained and grimed.

"Back to the road," the first one cried. "Ride back and fire the grass. It's sweeping down for miles in front. There's twenty fires alight."

"The blacks have set it going," another yelled. "It's springing everywhere."

"It's coming round both sides. It's all over the run," another shouted.

"The station-house?" Tony cried.

"The fires are all round it," was the answer. "Nothing can save it."

For a moment Tony sat still—for a moment. Then over him there swept a wave of emotion which blotted out everything from his mind but a sense of Ailleen's peril. A second thought would have suggested that she would have been warned, that she would have fled from the station long before; but he had no second thought. Only could he realize the peril she was in; only could he realize the need there was of helping her. Forgetful of what had occurred when last he was at the station; forgetful of the anger he had felt at her apparent preference of another to himself,—he remembered only that Ailleen might be in danger. Without heeding whether he was not himself riding into danger from whence there was no escape, he spurred his horse forward, and galloped off in the direction of the station.

As he rode the mirk of the smoke became denser, until his eyes were smarting and his lungs choking. His horse shied and tried to turn back, but Tony kept him going. The signs which served to show how great and widespread the fire was, only served to stimulate his anxiety to reach the station.

Suddenly the bush gave way before him as he emerged on to the Barellan road. The smoke was rolling along it in heavy volumes, but was less trying than it had been amongst the timber, and Tony again urged his horse into a gallop. The crackle and roar of the conflagration sounded on both sides, and he was marvelling that it had not yet burst out on to the road, when the sound of a horse coming towards him at break-neck speed arrested his attention. Scarcely had he heard the sound than through the haze of the smoke the horse, ridden by a girl, came into sight. Instinctively he reined up, and the thought flashed through his brain that it might be Ailleen.

The horse and its rider dashed out of the smoke, the horse with its neck stretched out, its eyes starting from its head, its tongue hanging out and blood-flecked foam on its nostrils. The rider was hatless, her clothes torn in shreds, and her hair streaming out on the wind. With one arm she was flogging her horse unmercifully; the other she was waving wildly around her head. The pace of the gallop carried her past Tony in a moment, but in that moment he recognized her—Nellie Murray.

With her eyes staring in a frenzy of madness, with her face wet and ghastly, and her voice raised in an endless mocking shriek of laughter, she dashed past him. There was no time to catch the words that seemed to blend with the laughter, there was no time to learn whether she saw him as she rode past, but there was time enough for his intuitions to work and teach him the originator of the fire and the reason of its existence. Nellie was avenging her defeat by Ailleen.

Straight down the road she raced, travelling with the smoke which, as it rolled along in great clouds of density, appealed to her as something that was humorous, as something that called for the long shouts of laughter with which she greeted it. Soon her horse, staggering in its stride, but still flogged to a gallop, emerged ahead of the heavy smoke though yet within the haze. The track which led to the Three-mile showed before her, and she turned her horse on to it from off the main road. Along its winding course she fled until the hut opened out. The horse lurched and stumbled in its stride, but mercilessly she used the switch, until, ten yards from the door, it came down on its knees, and, almost before she could spring from the saddle, rolled over, ridden to death.

She scarcely glanced at it as she rushed forward to the hut and flung the door open. On the stretcher Tap lay, his face terribly bruised and cut, moaning feebly. On one of the stools by the fireplace, sitting bunched up in a heap with his head on his hands, was Dickson. As she caught sight of him, she broke out again into her wild laugh.

"I said I'd come for you, Willy—and I've come," she shouted—"come with lots of friends for you, friends who won't let you get away any more. They're all round you, dancing and singing as they come along, nearer and nearer. Don't you hear them? Listen! Can't you smell the smoke in the air? She's part of it by this time. I've fired the grass and the bush all round the house. She can't get away. More can you," she added quickly, as Dickson rose to his feet, and, turning a haggard face towards her, shrank away to the corner of the hut.

"You devil!" he exclaimed. "You've fired the bush!"

"All over the place," she answered, with her head thrown back and her mocking laugh ringing through the place. "I told you—I told you, if you didn't come for me I'd come for you—and I've come. She can't touch you now; she's burned up like the grass, and the fences, and the trees, and the house. Oh, it burned so well!"

"It's coming this way," he cried, as his eye caught sight of the rolling clouds of smoke through the open door.

"Yes; it's coming this way," she answered, with a sudden calm—"it's coming this way for you—for you and me. Look! Look out there! See that big boomer there with the red tongues jumping up? Look on the top of it. Don't you see him? Just on the top he's floating—just as he's been on all the big smokes. He likes the big smokes. He laughs at me when he's up there like that. He's been asking for them—asking—asking—asking so long. Poor little man, they took him away, but I've found him, and he's found me."

Her voice died down to a mournful monotone as she spoke—colourless, unimpassioned, melancholy. But to Dickson it was twice as terrifying as when she shouted and laughed. He looked as she directed towards the big column of smoke, which suddenly sprang up, as it were, from a bed of writhing, twisting tongues of flame.

"It's on us!" he shrieked in a sudden access of panic, and made a dash for the door.

She turned and faced him, and, as he came up to her, flung her arms around him, and held him.

"Leave go," he shouted, as he struggled; but she only raised her face to his—a calm, set face, pale to the lips, and showing the more ghastly from the dishevelled mass of dark hair that surrounded it. "Leave go," he repeated; and, as she still held, he raised his fist and brought it down on the upturned face, and tried to wrest himself free.

She buried her face against his shirt, seizing part of it in her teeth to aid her to keep her hold of him. He struck at her head, at her arms, at her body, anywhere, so long as he hit her, in his efforts to throw her off. But she held him, and at last, mad with fear, he tried to stagger out of the hut, dragging her with him.

The man on the stretcher made an effort to raise himself as the noise of the scuffle roused him. He also saw through the open door the rolling masses of smoke and the dancing line of flame.

"The bush is afire," he gasped. "Here, Willy, get me out of this. Help me to move. Willy! Willy! My God! I'm your father, boy; don't leave me."

But Dickson, dragging Nellie with him, had already gained the door.

"I'm all broken up. I can't move alone. Willy! Willy!" Tap cried as loud as he could, for the fall he had had the night before had given him a mortal hurt.

Dickson had reached the door and stood for a moment helpless to move at the sight which met his glance. The fire seemed to have swept down in two wide converging curves, rushing through the bush and setting it ablaze all round before it advanced on to the cleared land of the selection. It had just attacked the vegetation in the paddocks as Dickson got outside the hut, and which ever way he looked he saw a line of leaping flames sweeping towards him. The heat was scorching; the air stifling. The voice of the man in the hut fell on unheeding ears, for only one chance of escape appeared, and that was Slaughter's waterhole. With Nellie clinging to him he staggered towards it. Every second the heat was more intense, the smoke-laden air more stifling, and at the edge of the pool he swayed, even the strength born of his fear deserting him. With a wild, hopeless cry he fell forward into the water, and floundered towards the middle of the fence which Slaughter had built across it. As he reached the middle, breathless and exhausted with fear and the strain of Nellie's weight, a line of flame darted through the grass at the side of the track, and sprang, like a snake, up the wall of the hut, writhing out over the dried sheets of bark of the roof as, with a roar, the whole burst into flame. Other flames leaped out along the line of the fence; the heat came upon him with such fierceness that he felt his skin blister and crack; the smoke entered his lungs and made him choke as though a cord were tied tight round his throat, and with a glimpse of Nellie's face, upturned as her arms relaxed and she slipped down under the water, Dickson fell senseless across the rail of the fence.



CHAPTER XX.

THE LAST LOOP.

At noon Ailleen, sitting on the verandah of Barellan, caught the scent of bush-fire smoke floating on the faint breeze. She rose and walked to the end of the verandah, where she could obtain a view in the direction whence the wind was blowing. Over the tops of the trees she saw smoke rising rapidly. Even as she stood she saw fresh columns spring up as though fires were being set alight at intervals all along the sky-line to windward. At first it rose in well-defined columns, straight up in the air, with such regularity that it seemed to be floating upwards to the faultless blue of the heavens from numberless sacrificial altars—as though it were the token of sacrifice offered by the drought-stricken earth to the pitiless sky above; a token of supplication from dumb, inarticulate Nature to the gods of the thunder-cloud and the rulers of the rain-mist, in pleading that the bonds which held back the tribute of the season might be freed and the thirst of the parched earth quenched.

But soon the columns were broken, soon the order was disorganized, as the smoke, fanned by the winds set up by heat below, swirled and twisted and changed into rolling clouds without form or regularity—clouds which massed together and formed into heavy banks that marred the clearness of the skies. The fringe, formed of the lighter vapour, floated over the trees, and drifted on the breeze towards the station, like the shreds of a white sea-fog blown too far inland. Very quickly it approached, and the air became filled with a pungent scent, and grew hot and stifling.

Without realizing the danger there was of the fire sweeping down on the station, Ailleen walked back to the other end of the verandah and looked away over the bush, and wherever she looked she saw smoke rising. The country was on fire on every side.

A second glance in the direction she had first looked showed also that the fire was rapidly travelling down the wind towards the station. Then she understood, and hastily sought the blind woman.

"The bush is on fire," she said when she found her. "It is burning all round and nobody seems to be about. We must get ready to go away in case it comes too near."

"It will not come near here," Mrs. Dickson answered. "No fire ever has yet. The men always turn out and stop it. That must be where Willy is. I knew there was something when he did not come back. He is out fighting it and saving the run. We need not be afraid."

"I don't know," Ailleen answered uneasily.

The air was becoming heavier and hotter every moment, and as she looked, she saw how much nearer the massed clouds of smoke were rolling.

"You need not be afraid," Mrs. Dickson went on. "You may be sure Willy is out with all the men he can muster, and they are keeping it back from the paddocks. Willy is such a brave boy; and besides, he would do anything rather than that harm should come to you."

"All the same I think I'll saddle——"

"Why do you never listen to what I say about Willy?" the blind woman interrupted. "You know how anxious he is, and how he is always seeking to please you. He is such a good boy, too. He would make——"

"I'd rather not talk about it, Mrs. Dickson," Ailleen interrupted.

She was growing impatient of the constant reference which the blind woman made to Willy and his excellent qualities, and his sadness at her distant bearing towards him.

"I cannot bear to have him unhappy," the elder woman said, sticking loyally to the task the crafty youth had set her of softening the obdurate girl to an appreciation of him and a recognition of his possibilities as a suitor for her affections.

Ailleen, glancing round the smoke-bedimmed horizon, caught sight of the figure of a man riding hastily across the paddock towards the house.

"There is some one coming," she said. "He seems to be riding to the back of the house. I'll go round and see who he is."

"Why, of course it's Willy," Mrs. Dickson answered. "Who else could it be?"

Ailleen walked round the verandah to the other side, and as the man approached, she was surprised to recognize Slaughter.

"Miss," he exclaimed, as he rode up, "the bush is afire all round. I've come through to see if you were safe. You must come at once, for the fire's coming down fast, and if you're not burned you'll be choked."

"But we're safe here," she replied.

"Safe here? You're right in the line of it. The wind's blowing it down quicker than a horse can gallop, and when the grass catches it'll have the house and everything in its track in no time. Come at once. If you've——"

"Mrs. Dickson is here. She's blind. Come and tell her. She would not believe me," Ailleen exclaimed, as she turned to hurry back to where the blind woman was sitting.

Slaughter jumped off his horse and came close under the verandah.

"Miss," he exclaimed; and Ailleen turned back. "Begging your pardon, miss," he went on, watching her face with anxious eyes, "but I've come for you, not for them. It's you I want to see safe. I started before the fire came up. I heard something, and I came out to see if you knew it, for I promised I'd see you safe when—I said I'd do my best. There's a bad lot about. It wasn't for me to do anything till now, but with the fire coming down you've a reason to get away, and you can have my horse."

She looked at him, with a smile on her face—a smile which came at his anxiety, in spite of the memories his presence stirred.

"I have my own horse," she said quietly.

"You had, miss; you haven't now. It was a part of what I heard. They've driven your horse away and all the others."

"Oh, nonsense!" she exclaimed.

"It's true," he answered earnestly. "I wouldn't tell you what isn't true. It was young Dickson said it. Do you know where he is now? He's at my place, he, and a mate of his, badly knocked about. There's another one somewhere—and he's the one I've got out ahead of, it seems. But there, look at the smoke rolling in! Come on, or we'll never get through," he added excitedly, pointing up to the smoke which was drifting rapidly over the house.

Ailleen glanced up and saw it. The fire was evidently coming down rapidly.

"I must tell Mrs. Dickson," she exclaimed, and turned away, running quickly along the verandah from the corner.

Slaughter climbed on to the verandah and followed her. As he turned the corner where Mrs. Dickson was sitting he started back with a cry.

"Kate Blair, by the living God!" he shouted, his face turning livid under the fury of rage that swept over him as he saw and recognized the woman who had ruined his life.

The sound of his voice and the name that was uttered made Mrs. Dickson start to her feet, her sightless eyes staring straight at the face of the man before her, her face pale to the lips, and her hands, quivering with excitement, held out in front of her.

"Who are you?" she gasped. "Who are you to speak like that?"

"Who am I?" Slaughter answered, speaking in a low, strained tone that was even more penetrating than his former shout. "Who am I?"

"Yes, yes," she exclaimed nervously. "Who are you? What right have you here? I don't know you, man."

A laugh, mirthless, cold, and full of devilish satire, came from his lips.

"You look me in the face and ask that question?" he said. "You——"

Ailleen, looking from one to the other in wondering surprise, caught at Slaughter's words.

"She's blind," she said hurriedly. "You must be mistaken. Mrs. Dickson is quite blind."

"Begging your pardon, miss," he said, as he turned towards her, "I forgot you were there for the moment; but maybe it's as well that you are. There's no mistake on my part."

He spoke with a calm self-possession that was in great contrast to the fury of his first exclamation, and in great contrast to the agitation of the blind woman.

"I don't know you—I don't know you," she went on repeating. "Go away. You have no right here."

"Then if you don't know me, maybe it'll be as well if I just say who you are to this young lady here," he said, with unmoved demeanour. "It may interest her to know, and you'll maybe place me when you hear all I know."

"It is nothing but a pack of lies—a lot of wretched lies. It is all untrue; everything is untrue," Mrs. Dickson exclaimed.

"Even before it is said," Slaughter remarked dryly. "Miss," he added, with a return of the angry vigour to his voice, "I told you my story once, the story of what made me a lonely man, the story of a lie a woman told to the woman I loved and who loved me. That woman—the woman I loved—was your mother. The other is there."

His tone had grown harder with every word, his eyes brighter, and his face more pale and set. As he spoke the last words there was an energy in voice and manner which seemed to make them almost a blow, and a blow before which the blind woman shrank.

"It's a lie!" she muttered. "It's a lie!"

"It was a lie," he thundered. "It was a lie that ruined one life and nearly blasted another, and now—now I've found you, after years of longing and waiting, found you as the mother of a scoundrel who sought to ruin the daughter of the woman you wronged."

"It's a lie!" she repeated. "My boy is brave; he would wrong no one."

"Where is he now?" Slaughter went on, in a voice that was loud and angry. "Where was he last night?"

"He is out at the fire," she said. "He is a brave boy and a good boy. Blame me as you like, but you shall not blame him."

Ailleen, watching the two, fascinated by the development which was as inexplicable to her as it was unexpected, felt a touch of pity as she saw the expression of pride come over the blind woman's face—pride for the absent Willy!

"The close companion of Barber," Slaughter said; and Mrs. Dickson, clasping her hands together, sank into her chair again.

"No," she said, "no. He promised me he would not touch the boy. He promised he would not lead him astray."

"Then Barber has been here?" Slaughter cried.

The blind woman nodded.

"When?" Slaughter demanded.

"More than a month ago," she said in a subdued voice, as she shuddered. "Ask Ailleen. She will tell you when. It was the day the rail broke."

"Why, that was Tony—Tony Taylor," Ailleen exclaimed, glad of any chance of interposing between the two.

Slaughter looked at her wonderingly, and as he looked there came a curious expression into his eyes.

"I must have been blind, I take it," he said, more as though he were speaking to himself. "I must have been blind—up to now."

"And Willy was with Tony last night?" Ailleen asked.

Slaughter started as he heard her voice.

"With Tony? No; he was with Barber, the most evil scoundrel, the—the—well, that woman's husband;" and he broke off as he swung round again towards Mrs. Dickson. "The man she married and left for another fool, who——"

"Don't!" the blind woman exclaimed. "Don't speak of him. Blame me—blame even Willy, but not him. I loved him."

Slaughter laughed in his mirthless, satirical manner again.

"Till yet another came," he said. "Till you met Dickson, and——"

"He was Dickson," she interrupted. "It was the name he took. It was——"

"And you profane his memory by saying that he was the father of that cowardly slab?" Slaughter broke in angrily.

"He was the father of my boy. It was why I named him Willy. It is why he is all my world, ever since his father was taken from me."

"Miss," Slaughter exclaimed, turning to Ailleen again, "it makes me mad to hear her. She lied of me as she now lies of him, who was my dearest friend in the old days, the man she led to ruin with the witchery of her face. It makes me mad, I say," he went on, his voice rising under the growing fury of his anger. "She wronged me bad enough, but——"

With a sudden access of the frenzy which had seized him when he met Barber at the Three-mile, he swung round upon the blind woman as she sat trembling in her chair, with his fists clenched and the evil light of mania in his eyes. Ailleen, seeing the look and the gesture, sprang at him and seized his arm.

"Stop!" she cried. "Would you strike a helpless woman like that?"

He looked at her with his blazing eyes.

"A woman?" he said hoarsely. "She's a fiend—a lying fiend. I have waited to kill her. Now the time has come. Now I can——"

The girl was in front of him, holding both his arms, and looking into his eyes with a fearless glance.

"You shall not," she said, as she struggled to push him back. "You shall not harm her. You are mistaken."

"Let me go. She nigh broke your mother's heart," he answered. "I've waited years. She's not fit to live. She even betrayed McMillan."

"No, no," the blind woman cried; "I did not—I did not! I gave up everything for him. I loved him."

Unnoticed in the excitement they were labouring under, the air had grown thicker with the smoke coming from the line of fires which almost surrounded them to windward. Unnoticed, also, was the figure of a horseman riding furiously up from the opposite direction. He sprang off his horse as he caught sight of them through the rapidly deepening haze of smoke, and, leaping from the ground, he clutched the verandah rail and pulled himself up.

"Quick for the horses! The fire is on you!" he shouted.

The blind woman started to her feet with a piercing shriek.

"His voice!" she cried. "It is him come back from the dead to save me. Willy, Willy, my love, oh, come to me!"

She turned to where he was, with outstretched arms, feeling in the air, helpless in her blindness to do more. Slaughter, with his arms dropped to his sides, stared vacantly at them. Only Ailleen understood.

"Thank God you've come, Tony!" she exclaimed.

"Where are your horses?" he shouted. "The fire has reached the grass. Slaughter, quick; it's life or death."

He sprang over the rail as he spoke, and pushed against Slaughter as he dashed over to Ailleen and seized her by the arm. The impact brought Slaughter out of his stupor.

"The horses are gone," he cried. Then, as his awakened sense showed him the peril they were in, he rushed along the verandah, shouting, "Fire the grass. It's our only chance."

"Go to the back of the house," Tony exclaimed to Ailleen, as he sped after him.

From the windward side of the verandah he and Slaughter leaped to the ground. The smoke was rolling towards them in great opaque billows and the air scorched their faces, for through the dense mass they saw the lurid gleam of the flames leaping and springing like living things thrown out in a skirmishing line across the grass-covered stretch of country. They dashed forward towards it, their eyes half blinded, their lungs choking, and their skin blistering.

"Light it there," Slaughter gasped; and Tony paused to get his match-box.

He flung a lighted match on the grass, and in a moment, with a roar and a glare that sent him reeling to the ground, the flames sprang up, dancing, skipping, rushing hither and thither as they licked up the fuel of the grass. In a moment they had passed from him, travelling in a widening circle, the curve to windward moving slowly, the curve to leeward looping as it ran over the ground. Through the line of flame and smoke he saw the station loom. A moment later it stood clear on the blackened earth, and on either side of it the broken line of flame sped on. Scrambling to his feet, he ran over the still smoking ashes towards the house, with one thought in his mind, one hope in his heart—that the woodwork had not caught.

He reached the verandah, which was reeking with the smell of scorched wood, and rushed round to the other side. The line of flame was already far beyond it, passing over the open grass country at the back with towering masses of dead white smoke rolling along overhead. On the verandah the blind woman sat, huddled up against the wall, and beside her Ailleen was standing.

She turned as she heard him, and took a step towards him with outstretched hands.

"Thank God you came," she said, as he caught her in his arms and held her.

"Darling, darling!" he whispered. "Ailleen, you are mine now."

"I always was," she answered, as she clung to him. "Oh, why have you been so long in coming? I thought you had forgotten."

"You sent me away the day I came, and they said——"

"Tony!"

She raised her head as she spoke, and looked at him with eyes full of deep reproach.

"I hardly cared for anything then," he said.

"Tony, I never meant that," she answered. "You rode off, and I thought——I'm so sorry, Tony."

The voice of the blind woman interrupted them.

"Where is he? Where is he? Why doesn't he come?" she said plaintively.

"Oh, Tony, I forgot," Ailleen exclaimed, as she loosened her arms. "Let me go to her."

"And where's Slaughter?" Tony cried, coming back from the clouds of happiness to the reality of their situation to discover that he only had returned to the station.

He hurried round to the other side of the house. The ground was black, with small wisps of smoke rising here and there for a considerable distance away, while a hundred yards off he saw an undefined heap lying. The sight of it made him shudder, and he rushed over to it, fearing what he dared not think.

It was Slaughter, senseless, with blackened face and singed hair, lying where he fell when the flames swept up around him and the smoke rolled over him, shutting him off from escape and filling his lungs till he was overcome.

Tony seized him by the shoulders, and, half carrying, half dragging him, succeeded in getting him to the house. Ailleen, seeing him coming, met him with some water, and between them they bathed his head and hands until there was some sign of returning vitality. But consciousness was longer in reviving, and Slaughter still lay insensible when a rescue party from the men who were fighting the fires pressed through the lines and reached Barellan.

For many days after Slaughter lay ill, almost at death's door, to the sorrow and anxiety of Birralong; for the nightly gatherings at Marmot's temporary store had much food for reflection in the knowledge which came to them after the days of the great bush fire.

The charred ruins of the Three-mile, and the shallow waterhole beside the hut, revealed enough to put to shame the scandal that had been laid on Slaughter's shoulders, and for that alone Birralong, collectively, acknowledged the blame of a grievous fault. But there was more than mere acknowledgment of error needed to balance accounts. The fire that Tony lit in the grass at Barellan would have been of no value in saving the station had not another been lit farther away and nearer the onward rushing line of raging fury. The heat and smoke where Tony stopped nearly overpowered him, but Slaughter had dashed almost up to the oncoming line before he fired the grass; and the men of Birralong, who knew what bush fires mean, had no words to express what they thought of Slaughter's act.

"Cold-blood Slaughter, eh?" Cullen said, when he heard it; and then he stood up and took off his hat, and remained standing, with bowed head, till the others caught his meaning and followed his example; and so, while Slaughter lay nearly dying at Barellan, the men of Birralong nightly greeted the mention of his name.

But that was not all the news which came to the gossips of the town. The story that Tony had heard from the dying Barber, and which he had re-told at the Flat, was known to every one; Nuggan, anxious to cover his retreat from an awkward position, being assiduous in spreading it. Later, when rumour had it that the Lady of Barellan had claimed that Tony and not Dickson must be her son, Birralong was prepared to support her, more especially when it was known that Ailleen had never wavered in her allegiance to the champion of the district. But there was no proof of her right to make the claim till Slaughter had recovered, and even then, in a legal sense, there was not much of a case to go on. Only was there the statement that the dead McMillan lived again in the features and figure of Tony; but it satisfied Birralong, and no one came forward to dispute it. Even if the question had been raised no interest would have been served, for Mrs. Dickson willed that if Barellan could not be his, it should be Ailleen's, and with Peters's Reef a "boomer," as Palmer Billy averred, their future was assured when Tony and Ailleen were wed.

Birralong took it soberly till the last event occurred. Then festivity reigned supreme, and the resources of the Rest were strained to meet the calls, made by a thirsty district, to do honour to the occasion. And always was there another cheer and another excuse for a toast when the raucous voice of Palmer Billy proclaimed the fact—which it did till the coming of dawn—that they were "both to be ranked with the real McKay, and both were colonial born."



THE END

* * * * *

LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

THE TRACK OF MIDNIGHT.

By G. FIRTH SCOTT.

Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d.

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The Romance of Australian Exploring.

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"The story of Australian settlement is of enthralling interest, and the tales of the early explorers furnish a wonderful record of courage, endurance, and dogged perseverance.... Very curious are the descriptions of the aborigines and the various fashions in which they received the white men, who seemed to them to have descended from some other world."—Morning Post.

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- Transcriber's Note: Typographical errors corrected in the text: Page 178 proprieter changed to proprietor Page 227 corroborrees changed to corroborees Page 275 orgie changed to orgy Page 304 gound changed to ground -

THE END