

E-text prepared by Christine Bell and Marc D'Hooghe
(http://www.freeliterature.org)



THE PIONEERS

by

KATHARINE S. PRICHARD




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 <DW72>s, 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 <DW72> 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 <DW72> 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 <DW72> 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- 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 <DW72> 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- 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 <DW72>s 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  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- 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 <DW72>s 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- 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 debris 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 <DW72>s 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 <DW72>
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.

Now that Farrel had only one eye, McNab feared him less, although when
the concentrated light of the Schoolmaster's spirit poured from it in a
single beam, he fidgeted, showed craven and was glad to escape.

No one had the knack that Dan Farrel had of showing McNab to the Wirree
for what he was. The Schoolmaster could string McNab up before the eyes
of the men in the bar on the thread of one of his whimsical humours and
show him dangling, all his crooked limbs writhing, his twisted face
simmering with wrath. He could pin McNab with a few, lightly-flung words
and make a butt of him, where he stood before his rows of short-necked,
black and muddied bottles. He would have him quivering with wrath,
impotent against that bitter, blithe wit and the laughter it raised. He
laughed too--McNab. He was wise, as cunning as a dingo. Though his eyes
were baleful, and his hands shook as he poured the raw spirits from his
bottle into a mug beside him, he laughed.

"It's a mad game y're on with McNab," Salt Watson, one of the oldest of
the Wirreeford men, said to the Schoolmaster one evening on his way
home. "Give it up, Dan! It's good enough to make the boys laugh, but
you've only to look at Thad's face when he smiles to know what he is
promising himself of it all."

The Schoolmaster had watched McNab's face when he smiled. He had learnt
all he wanted to. He knew what Salt meant.

For awhile he dropped out of the circle round Thad's bar. When he made
one of it, his laughter was less frequent, and he missed McNab when his
lightly-flung arrows of wit whistled in the assembly. His spirits had
suffered a depression. Some of the men thought the trouble with his eyes
was on his mind. He avoided encounters with McNab, though none of them
had any idea he was afraid of Thad. His one eye was more than a match
for Thad's two any day, they knew.

There was no open quarrel between them. The Schoolmaster's duelling with
McNab had never been more than a laughing matter, a pricking, rapier
fashion, in the intervals of card-playing and drinks. It had an air of
good-fellowship. His humour had a quality of amiability, though nobody
was deceived by it, least of all Thad himself. There was always contempt
and an underlying bitterness in it.




CHAPTER XXII


"What's the matter with Davey?" Farrel asked his daughter a few days
later. "I've asked him to come up here and have tea with us, but he
won't come. He'll barely speak to me when we meet, gets out of my way if
he sees me coming."

Deirdre was kneeling by the hearth waiting for the kettle to boil. Their
table was spread with cups and saucers and a little pile of toast smoked
beside the teapot. She said nothing, only bent her head lower to avoid
his glance.

"Have you got anything to do with it?" he asked.

The firelight played on her face. For a moment she thought she would
tell him of the meeting under the trees and the promises she and Davey
had made to each other when they said good-bye. But there was so much to
tell, and he would be hurt that she had not told him about it long ago.
They never had any secrets. She had shared all her thoughts with Dan. At
first, that she and Davey were sweethearts, had just been something to
smile about and gossip over with herself.

The Schoolmaster had wondered while they were away why she was always
restless and wanting to get back to the hills. And now there was shame
and grief in her heart--a smarting sense of anger and disappointment
that had come of seeing Davey dancing with Jess, and of hearing what
people were saying about them. It was all fixed up between Ross's Jess
and Davey Cameron, someone had told her, and remarked what a fine couple
they would make, and how satisfied their parents were about it--even
Donald Cameron, who was not an easy man to please. She could not explain
all that.

Dan read in her face something of what was in her mind. He took her hand
and looked into her face. It was quivering and downcast.

"Then you have had something to do with it, Deirdre," he said.

"No."

Her voice broke.

"It was the night of the dance, at Mrs. Mary Ann's the night we came, I
remember," he said; "Conal was there, and Davey went away angry."

"I've tried to speak to him a dozen times, since," she cried.

"Well, I can't quite make it out," the Schoolmaster said, after a few
moments, "but they tell me in the town that since his father's been ill
and Davey's had charge of things, he's been drinking a good deal and
playing the fool at McNab's generally. We've got to try and get him out
of that, if it's only for his mother's sake, Deirdre. We owe her a
bigger debt, you and I--you because you love me--than we can ever
repay."

"She owes you something, too," the girl said quickly, "that night of the
fires if you hadn't tried to prevent it--"

She knew that he was displeased.

"You mustn't say that again," he said.

"Oh, I hate her! I hate her!" Deirdre cried, passionately.

"What do you mean?"

The Schoolmaster's voice was very quiet.

Deirdre clung to him sobbing.

"I didn't mean that I hate her really," she said, "I like her too. But
she's the only one who has ever come between you and me, Dan, and I
can't bear it."

He drew her to his knees and looked down gravely into her face. Her body
was stiff against his; it shuddered and a storm of tears shook her.
Tragic dark eyes were lifted to his when her weeping had spent itself.

"When she came and you looked at her, my heart died," she said. "Don't
you remember when we used to gather the wild flowers to put on the table
at school, you used to say we could never find a flower that was like
her eyes. When we made a Mrs. Cameron bouquet, we used to put in it
white honey-flowers and the pink giraffe orchids that grow on a long
stem, for the colour of her cheeks, scarlet-runners for her mouth, and
fly-catchers for her hair. Don't you remember? At first we couldn't find
anything for her hair, but then I found the climbing fly-catchers with
the little pink buds on the end of them. The down on the leaves, all
browny gold and glistening in the sun, was a little bit like her hair,
wasn't it, Dan?"

"Yes," he said, his mind going back to all their gay gatherings of wild
flowers for Mrs. Cameron. It awed and surprised him that she should even
then have discovered what his most secret heart was scarcely aware of.

"It was the little blue flowers, don't you remember, we put in for her
eyes?" Deirdre went on, "Though you said that they weren't a bit like
her eyes. 'Dew on the grass' is what some would call her eyes, but it is
a poor colour, that--dew on the grass--no colour at all,' you said.
'Grass with the dew on it, or dew with a scrap of heaven, or the
twilight shining in it, would have been better. That's what she has,
Deirdre,' you used to say; 'eyes with the twilight in them--twilight
eyes--you can see her thoughts gathering in them, brooding and dark, or
glimmering like the light of the day, dying,' Do you remember saying all
that to me? I do; because I've said it over to myself so often."

He understood the apprehensive, shy and shamed confession of her eyes.

"Do you mean," he asked, "that Deirdre thinks anybody could be to me
what she is?"

Deirdre nodded, her contrite gaze melting into his.

"That one," his head turned in the direction of the hills, "is like the
Mother of God to me. She was very good to me when I was a desperate man,
long ago."

Deirdre gazed at him, her lips quivering.

"That's why you must always love her--Mrs. Cameron--my darling black
head," he said.

"Sing it to me," Deirdre cried, thirsting for the tenderness of the old
song.

He gathered her up in his arms and crooned in the Gaelic as he used to
when she was a baby:

     "Put your black head, darling, darling, darling.
     Your darling black head my heart above.
     O mouth of honey, with thyme for fragrance.
     Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?"

Deirdre, pressing to him, tasted the satisfaction that all young
creatures have in being close to those they love. His arms were warm and
tender. An invasion of peace drove the sorrowful ache from her heart.

"My own mother," she asked suddenly. "Was she like Mrs. Cameron?"

"No."

There was the mingling of grief and troubled thinking in his face that
she had always seen there when he spoke of her mother.

"She had a little brown bird, an English bird that sang in a cage," he
said. "She was like that; but she never sang herself. She was one of
those people life has broken, Deirdre."

"You married her ... and looked after her, Dan!"

His head dropped; he avoided her eyes.

"Then you came ... and she died," he said.

"Such a sorrowful mite you were!" he went on. "Such a lonely baby,
wailing night and day, that there was only one name to give you,
Deirdre--Deirdre of the griefs."

His eyes were lifted to hers. The black shield covered one of them; the
other was shining with his tenderness for her, the strength of the tide
behind it.

"It was a sorrowful name to give you, darling, you that have been the
sunshine, and have banished the sorrows of my life," he cried. "May they
never come any more or grief touch us again!"




CHAPTER XXIII


Strange tales were being told of Cameron's son in Wirreeford.

Donald Cameron had been laid up, crippled with rheumatism since the
early spring, and Davey had been managing for him. For the first time in
his life the boy found himself with responsibility, authority and money
in his hands. The old man required a strict account of his movements and
operations, allowing him only a few shillings to pay for his meals and
nothing over for the couple of drinks that cemented a deal in the
township.

McNab had got hold of Young Davey. How it was not exactly known.

"Let the old man sew up his money-bags, Young Davey'll open them for
him," sale-yard loafers began to say.

Davey swaggered. He was cock of the walk at McNab's. Conal had gone to
New South Wales again, and now there was not a man spent more, nor was
as free with the dice as Davey.

The Schoolmaster heard McNab talking to Davey in the parlour behind the
bar one evening, filling the boy with a flattery that went to his head
faster than the crude spirits he plied him with.

"The only son of the richest man in these parts--be a bit of a
millionaire y'self, Davey--when y're too old to enjoy the money--have a
good time with it," McNab said. "Your father's a great man--a great man,
Davey--a bit near, that's all--don't understand that a high-spirited
youngster like you'se got to have a bit of gilt about him! Makes you
look ridiculous, that's what it does, havin' no more money about you
than a teamster, or a bloomin' rouseabout."

"Here you ... you hold your tongue about the old man, McNab," Davey
struggled to say. "You ... you give me the money. It'll be all right
when I come into the property. I want to go'n have a game with the boys
now."

McNab sniggered.

"Oh well--you're a lad, Davey," he said. "As good a man with cattle as
your father, and you know better than he does how to make yourself
popular. We used to say you was as mean as him once--a chip of the old
block."

Davey started to his feet. He stood by the table, swaying a little as he
hung to it.

"You ... you be careful, McNab, or I'll smash your damned head," he
said.

It was only when they were very fuddled that men spoke to him like this.
McNab giggled.

Farrel heard the boy's voice. It came to him, thick and uncertain,
through the thin walls. The door of McNab's parlour was ajar. He caught
a glimpse of Davey's sullen, flushed face, his eyes, stupid and dull,
with the glow of drink in them.

He pushed open the door and went into the room.

"Hullo, Davey," he said, "I was looking for you."

Davey stared at him uncertainly.

"You mayn't know, Mr. Farrel," McNab said, an evil light in his yellow
eyes, "but Davey, here, is doing an important bit of business with me
and you're intrudin'."

The Schoolmaster glanced at him.

"Intruding, am I?" he replied coolly. "Well, it seems to me, it's just
about time."

"What do you mean? What the hell do you mean?"

"School's out, Mr. Farrel," Davey crowed, lurching back on his heels.
"You hurry up and give me the money, McNab."

McNab put a couple of sovereigns into his hand.

"Come and have a drink, Mr. Farrel," Davey cried boisterously. "There's
a couple of chaps in the bar ... waiting for me ... and I'll play you
poker, bob rises. Not a dime more."

He staggered across the room and threw open the door into the tap-room.
McNab followed him, turning back at the doorway to shoot a glance of
triumph at the Schoolmaster.

Davey's appearance in the bar was hailed with a shout. Dan heard the
rattling of bottles and glasses, the shouts of laughter, blaring of
oaths and stamping of heavy feet that followed the boy's call for drinks
all round.

Fragments of a song, bawled jocosely, came to the Schoolmaster's ears as
he tramped down the road to the cottage, on the edge of the township.

He brooded over the change in Davey, asking himself how he came to be
kicking over the traces; why he was going to the dogs with the
ne'er-do-wells of McNab's, what Donald Cameron would say to it if he
knew; how he could fail to know; what his mother was feeling and
thinking about it. She would know, of that he was certain. Not much
escaped those clear, still eyes of hers.

In the morning when he saw the boy again, he tried to speak to him; but
Davey swung past, dragging his hat over his face, shamefacedly.

The Schoolmaster got into the habit of watching him, trying to see his
face. Sometimes it surprised him. He had seen Davey thrashing a steer
until the blood poured from its tawny hide. He had seen him swinging
along the roads on sale days after the midday meal, reckless and
laughing, his head thrown back, a couple of McNab's men at his heels. He
had heard him singing drunkenly on his way home to the hills in the
evenings.

He went after him one evening, when Johnson, Cameron's head stockman,
had gone on early, and Davey was going home alone.

"Look here, Davey," he said, riding beside him, "what's this game you're
on? You'll have to drop it."

Davey laughed.

"You're like the rest of them," he said bitterly. "Think a fellow never
grows up! I've been treated like a kid too long. The old man's been
making me the laughing stock of the country ... and he's got to
understand I'm a man ... and I've got to be treated like one."

"You needn't go drinking and chucking money about at McNab's to be
that--"

Davey's eyes veered on him.

"Conal does it," he said. "And you all think no end of him."

"Oh, Conal! What has he got to do with it?" The Schoolmaster hesitated.
"Conal does it ... but then he's a roadster. It comes natural to him. It
doesn't to you. You're Cameron's son and--"

"Cameron's son!" Davey scoffed. "Much good that does me!"

"What's your father going to say when he hears about this business at
the Black Bull," the Schoolmaster asked.

"Say? Oh, he'll cut up at first. He's got to understand though, I've got
to go my own way--have some money to call my own. He won't know more
than's good for him though. That's arranged between McNab and me."

"You don't mean to say you've got into any--arrangement with McNab?" the
Schoolmaster asked.

"Oh, you needn't look like that about it," Davey replied. "It's a
harmless one. He's been decent. I'm not fool enough to give McNab any
real handle against me."

"You're a darned fool, Davey," the Schoolmaster said, his voice ripping
the silence with startled energy. "McNab and his crew'll have you in a
hole before you know where you are."

Davey flicked the reins across his mare's neck. She leapt forward along
the track.

There was not a man in Wirreeford who did not think he knew what Thad
was driving at, that he was working for a shot at Donald Cameron through
Young Davey. Only he did not see it, the calf, they said. They laughed
and followed the course of Thad's snaring, with winks, chuckles of
amusement, and sly jokes at Young Davey's expense, although they drank
with him, flattered and applauded him, playing up to the part McNab had
set them.

The Schoolmaster tried again to warn the boy. This time, Davey was
inclined to listen to him.

"What can McNab do to me?" he asked. "I'm not a lag, or a lag's son."

"No," the Schoolmaster said, a little bitterly. "But I've been watching
McNab--seeing the way he works. He's got a genius for the underhand job.
There's not much he couldn't do if he set his mind to it. He's set his
mind to something now I can see that ... and you're in the way of it. I
don't know exactly what it is. You know he doesn't love your father.
Perhaps it's that. He's never forgiven him for trying to get him cleared
out. He's using you somehow, Davey."

"I believe you're right, Mr. Farrel," Davey said slowly, after a while.
"I've been a fool!" He swore uneasily. "Think I've been mad lately. I
wanted people to reckon I wasn't ... just Cameron's son, and 'mean as
they make 'em!' I'm two parts wrong and one part right. The right part
is, I've got to be independent. I've got to have money of my own. It was
what you said the other night set me thinking. I'm going to keep out of
McNab's way."

"McNab never shows his hand when he means to win, Davey," there was a
whimsical inflection in the Schoolmaster's voice. "You can only beat him
at his own game if you don't let him see your cards either."

"Eh?" the boy looked at him. "You mean don't drop him at once ... let
him down slowly."

"Yes. He's got his knife into me, too, you know, though he hasn't shown
it quite clearly yet. He's good at the waiting game. It'll be a bit
interesting to see how he marks us both off--if we don't mark him off,
that is. I'm going to get out of his way as soon as I can. I'm giving up
the teaching here. Deirdre and I are going up to Steve's for a while,
and then I hope we'll shake the dust of the Wirree off our feet."

They were parting when the Schoolmaster said:

"Hear Pat and Tom Kearney have cleared out to the new rush? Eaglehawk,
isn't it? They brought in a mob for Conal--Maitland's cattle--from the
North-west, poor as mice. They said Conal was on the roads and will be
in presently to take them up to the hills. Maitland's got a couple of
fattening paddocks beyond Steve's."

Two days later, on sale day, this same scraggy mob of northern bullocks
was still in the largest pen of the Wirreeford yards. Davey heard them
bellowing mournfully.

"Conal's been expected the last couple of days to take charge of them,"
somebody told him. "But he's not come yet, and the Schoolmaster's
beating the town for a man to drive 'em to the hills for him. The boys
've all cleared out to the rush. Dan's goin' to take them himself in the
morning."




CHAPTER XXIV


Mrs. Cameron was not seen in Wirreeford during those months of her
husband's illness. Cameron drove into the township unexpectedly one day
when the sales were in progress and she was with him. He went to the
yards and she turned the horse, a sturdy daughter of old Lassie, back
along the road and halted her outside the Schoolmaster's cottage.

Deirdre went out to meet her.

"I only heard you were back a few days ago, Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron said.

"Didn't Davey tell you?" Deirdre asked.

"No," his mother replied.

They went indoors and Mrs. Cameron sat with her back to the window in
the Schoolmaster's wicker chair. Deirdre noticed that she looked older
and wearier than when she had last seen her.

"They tell me you're to marry Conal, the drover, dear," Mrs. Cameron
said.

"It's not true!" Deirdre gasped, turning away from her. "Who told you?"

"Mrs. Ross, it was," Mrs. Cameron replied. "She was over the other day
... she and Jess. She said the boys had heard at the sales."

"They tell me," Deirdre's eyes met Mrs. Cameron's, and her voice ran as
quietly as hers, "that Davey's to marry Jess Ross."

"Oh," Mrs. Cameron exclaimed, distressfully, "I don't know! They say so,
but Davey--"

Her face worked pitifully.

"He's so strange. I don't understand him at all, Deirdre. He's so
changed. I can't help him ... can't do anything for him. He seems to
have become a man quite suddenly, and--"

She put her hands over her eyes and began to cry.

Deirdre bent over her.

"Don't! Don't cry, Mrs. Cameron, dear," she whispered, kissing her.

"It's so foolish," Mary Cameron said tremulously, as if asking
forbearance, "but my heart's just breaking to see Davey like he is! I
have managed to keep his father from knowing, so far, but I'm afraid--I
daren't think what will happen when he knows."

Deirdre said nothing, but her eyes were full.

Mrs. Cameron stretched a hand out to her.

"Oh, dear," she said, "they say it is Jess, Davey's going to marry, but
I can't think it's anybody but you he cares about. When first you went
away we used to talk about you; Davey used to say: 'She's a Pelling, I
do believe, mother'--because of the fairy-tale I used to tell him. He
made me tell it over and over again after you'd gone away. It was about
Penelop, the tylwyth teg, who married the farmer's boy. Do you remember,
Deirdre? I'm sure I told it to you, too, in the old days."

"Yes," Deirdre cried breathlessly, "and ever afterwards their
descendants were called Pellings, the children of Penelop, and it was
said, if they had dark hair and bright eyes, there was fairy blood in
their veins."

Mrs. Cameron smiled.

"Yes," she said, "fancy you remembering it after all this long time,
dear. Once, soon after you'd gone away, Davey said to me, 'I wonder if
Deirdre married me, mother, would she melt away if I touched her with a
piece of iron.' He sat thinking and smiling a long time, Deirdre, and I
felt so happy about you both.... Then you came back ... and it was all
different."

"I've been thinking perhaps it was Conal has come between you." The eyes
of Davey's mother were very wistful. "But if you're not going to marry
Conal, perhaps you can be good friends with Davey again, Deirdre. He
would do anything in the world for you once. The other night when he
came home--he had been at McNab's until late and the drink was strong on
him--I couldn't let him into the house for fear of his father waking. He
slept in the barn and I sat near him ... I was afraid he might light a
match and drop it in the hay ... and he talked in his sleep--sobbing and
crying--and it was your name he was saying, over and over again to
himself, as though his heart was breaking over it, 'Deirdre! Deirdre!'"

"And there's some affair with McNab troubling him," Mrs. Cameron went
on. "I don't know what it is. Oh, I don't know what he's been doing to
get mixed up with McNab in anything--I know he can mean Davey no good
whatever. He has sworn to have vengeance on his father for long enough.
They say you're the most beautiful woman in the country, Deirdre. If
only you'd help me to keep Davey away from McNab's! You could! He'd do
anything for you in the old days. What is it has come between you?"

Mrs. Cameron's eyes were very like Davey's had been when he kissed her
under the trees, Deirdre thought.

She put her hand in Mrs. Cameron's.

A shadow darkened the window, breaking the blank of the sunlight beyond
it. The Schoolmaster came in at the door that overlooked the road.

An exclamation drew his gaze to the far end of the room.

Mrs. Cameron held out her hand to him.

She had not seen him since the night of the fires. Deirdre went to her
little lean-to of a kitchen and busied herself making tea.

When she returned, Mrs. Cameron was sitting as she had left her, on the
wicker chair with her back to the light; but there was an added pain in
her eyes: her hands lay limp in her lap.

Deirdre had a tray with tea and the cups on it. She set it down on the
table in the middle of the room, and they gathered their chairs about
it.

"What a nice home you've got," Mrs. Cameron said, smiling at the
Schoolmaster. "Deirdre has turned out a wonderful housekeeper after
all."

The Schoolmaster laughed.

"She was always more eager to be 'possuming and chasing calves with
Davey than to be learning to cook and sew, wasn't she?" he said.

"But after a while she made butter as well as I could." Mrs. Cameron
smiled. "And as for spinning, Deirdre could take my old wheel and twist
up a yarn for me in no time. Will you let her come soon to stay with me
for a while?"

"Yes."

The Schoolmaster's eyes dwelt on the girl for a moment.

"There are not enough children coming for schooling. We won't be here
for much longer," he said. "We'll be going up to Steve's soon."

"Going up to Steve's?" Deirdre asked. "When?"

The Schoolmaster did not answer at once.

"When Conal gets back. I want to see him first," he said. "We'll just be
staying a few weeks with Steve for a holiday and then be leaving the
district again."

Mrs. Cameron sat talking to them of the every-day affairs of her life, a
little longer. Then she got up to go.

"Is it true what they say--that he will lose his sight?" she asked
Deirdre when they were outside.

Deirdre nodded. She could scarcely speak of the time when the light of
the world would be blotted out for ever from Dan.

"We saw a doctor in Rane. He said so," she replied.

Mrs. Cameron's exclamation was in the soft tongue of the spinning song
she sang when she sat with her wheel in the garden. Deirdre did not know
the words, but she understood their distress and the little gesture that
went with them.




CHAPTER XXV


Donald Cameron was made of the stuff that gives confidence and
appreciation grudgingly. He was obsessed by the idea that no one could
do anything as well as he could. He could only satisfy his own reckless
desire to be up and doing by girding at all that was being done for him.
If Davey had been less efficient a stop-gap it would have pleased him
better. He would have liked to see mistakes made which would assure him
that no one but himself could run Ayrmuir as it ought to be run. But
Davey had done very well in his place. He had brought off one bargain
with a smartness that his father vaguely resented, and Davey was
chockful of boyish pride over.

There had been chafings and crossings of will, two or three times. Mary
Cameron trembled when she heard them. Anxious fears fluttered and filled
her with foreboding every time her husband's irritability at his chained
helplessness and crippling pain was directed at Davey. The boy's short
answers with an underlying contempt in them fanned his father's
smouldering wrath.

"Davey, dear," she had said once, after there had been high words
between them, "try and be a little more patient with your father. It's
hard on him having to sit in a chair like this after the active life
he's led. He's fretting his heart out to be up and doing things, and
seeing them done the way he likes."

"There's no pleasing him, mother," Davey said, shaking her arms from
him.

She knew he was right, but Davey was almost as sullen and surly as his
father these days. Donald Cameron kept him going all day. The boy was
dog-weary when he came into the house at nightfall; then there were
entries to make and book-keeping to do, accounts of sales and movements
of stock to render, and nothing but carping and fault-finding for his
pains.

At one time, in the evenings he used to take out his books and read
intently for hours, sprawling over the table, till the candle flickered
down and his mother said softly: "Won't you go to bed now, dear?"
knowing that late hours were never an excuse, in Donald Cameron's eyes,
for failing to be out after the cows before the sun was up. But now he
lay in his chair, his long legs stretched out before him, after he had
given his father an account of the day's work, and got from him
directions for the next; and there was a sullen, brooding look on his
face, an expression in his eyes that it hurt her to see.

Davey's face had changed so within the last few months. It was a
revelation to her. There was a firmness of line about his chin and upper
lip that caused her to glance from him to his father. Little of the boy
was left in Davey now, she realised. What there was lay in his eyes and
about his mouth. It was as if the child in him were dying hard.
Something had hurt him bitterly, she surmised, and she wondered whether
it was bitter thinking, hard riding, or the life he was leading with
strange, rough men that had brought those creases about his nose, given
his face its dour manliness.

This man-Davey was a strange to her. Her heart yearned over him, as
though her baby had been snatched from her arms. She wanted to know him,
to understand his ways of thinking. But he had a new and strange manner
with her. His mind was shut. He kissed her in a perfunctory fashion, and
when she put her arms round him, he stiffened under them. In sympathetic
sensitive fashion she knew that he was guarding the kingdom of himself
against her. She had some subtle warning that he was afraid of her love,
of her tenderness, which, with its fine edge, might prize open the inner
shell of his being and discover the trouble and tremulous fury of
emotion which lay hidden within.

She was afraid of offending him, afraid of approaching him with her
affection and sympathy, afraid not to respect the reserve that he had
put between them. Yet her anxiety tormenting her, one day she said:

"Tell me what is troubling you, Davey? Tell me. It is breaking my heart
to see you like this."

"There's nothing to tell, mother," he replied sharply.

For a long time he had not been coming home till late. The silence of
the long evenings when she sat and sewed by the fire and Donald Cameron
glowered into it, smoking, had been unbroken. Sometimes he had asked
where Davey was. Then she stilled the tremors in her voice to say
quietly that she thought he was with the Rosses or at Mrs. Hegarty's for
the dancing.




CHAPTER XXVI


When Davey came in from the Wirree, the night after Mrs. Cameron had
been to see Deirdre and the Schoolmaster, Donald Cameron was standing
before the fire.

He had said nothing all the way of the long drive from Wirreeford; but
his wife, by the set of his face, knew that something unusual had
happened. He stood before the fireplace waiting for Davey to come home,
listening for the sound of his horse's feet, the yelping of the dogs in
the yard that would announce his arrival.

Before they had left the sale-yards, as he was sitting in the high buggy
before they drove off, he had sent her back to look for Davey and tell
him to come home as soon as the sales were over. Davey, a lean, lithe
figure, on the edge of a group of stockmen, had recognised the urgency
in her voice, the appeal of her eyes, as she gave him the message.

"We were just fixing-up to have a game of poker to-night, Mrs. Cameron,"
Mick Ross had said.

She sought Davey's eyes. The shadow of his hat was over them. He stood a
moment flicking his leggings with the lash of the long whip curled on
his arm.

"Right, mother! I'll come along, presently," he said.

She went back to her husband, her heart soothed.

But his face all the way home had filled her with fear.

"Has anything happened to upset you, Donald," she asked.

"Aye, matter enough," he replied.

"What is it?" she ventured.

"You'll hear soon."

He lapsed into silence again.

She knew that there was trouble ahead for Davey. What it was she could
only imagine; every fibre of her being ached to know. She hurried Jenny
on with the dinner so that his father's inner man would be warmed and
comforted before Davey arrived.

He was an hour or two later than they were.

When he came into the kitchen she went up to him and put her arms round
him.

"Whatever you do, don't cross your father, Davey dear," she said. "He's
in a queer temper to-night."

Davey looked at her stupidly. He threw off his hat and brushed his hand
across his forehead.

"Right, mother," he said slowly.

His voice was thick. She smelt the whisky on his breath as he turned
into the next room.

Hurrying backwards and forwards from the fire to the table, lifting the
dinner she had kept warm for him by the fire, she did not hear the first
words of the storm that was brewing in the inner room. Lifting the tray
she carried it in, but on the threshold she stood still, her heart cold
at the sight of her husband and son.

They were facing each other, all the antagonism that had been latent for
months, between them, ablaze in their eyes, betrayed by every line of
their passion-white faces. She put her tray on the table.

Donald Cameron had a packet of papers in his hand. The torn envelope he
had taken them from lay on the floor.

"Look at them ... look at them!" he shouted. "Perhaps you can tell me
the meaning of them."

David took the papers. He pushed back a chair, staring at them.

"Curse McNab!" he muttered. "He promised me--"

"Curb your tongue in this house!" Donald Cameron took a step forward.
"Have you anything to say to these bills? McNab says you've had credit
for a couple of hundred pounds."

Davey's head cleared. The sight of his father's face, livid with rage,
raised a demon in him.

"Yes," he said, "there's a couple of drinks I had to-day not charged
for."

"You insolent young blackguard!" Donald Cameron cried, careless of words
in his anger. "Is this the sort of son I've got--goes robbing me behind
my back, drinking with pothouse boys, lags and thieves? I thought you
could be trusted to take charge of my interests while I was ill."

"Stop that!" Davey's nostrils quivered ominously.

"Thought you could play the young lord ... and McNab comes telling me--"

"I'll wring McNab's neck!"

"Aye, you will," said the old man, bitterly. "You've let him wring you
properly. McNab's got no reason to love me and you know it ... but he
did the square thing this time--if he never did it in his life before,
telling me I was being robbed by my own son."

"I'd advise you, father, not to talk that way," Davey's temper was
rising. "I wanted money; you wouldn't have given it to me if I'd asked
for it. I had to get it. McNab lent it to me. He said I could pay him by
and by, and that it was good enough--being Cameron's son--to borrow
money on. He said you'd never see these receipts I gave him."

"Well, you'll borrow no more," Donald Cameron breathed. "Johnson can
take charge of things till I'm about again. And before you make an
arrangement of this kind again you'll perhaps wait till I'm dead and
buried. I'll have it posted in the Wirree that no one is to serve you
with drink unless you pay for it."

"If you do that--" Davey began.

"What I regret is that I didn't give Johnson charge of things from the
first," the old man continued. "But I set my own son before him. You've
shown y' weren't fit for the trust--snaring me on a level with gaol
birds...."

Davey's voice trembled with passion.

"I haven't snared you!" he cried, "I haven't taken what wasn't my own.
Isn't what's yours, mine? Haven't you always said so? Isn't that what
you've said when I've asked for wages and you've said: 'No!' Haven't you
said that it will be all mine some day--this place and all the money
you've made? Who else have you got to give it to? I've only been doing
with the money what you ought to have done. I've spent some of it so as
not to have us shamed in the country."

"Oh, that's it, is it?" Donald Cameron's grey eyes gleamed beneath their
shaggy brows. "The son's to make ducks and drakes of the fortune the
father earns by the sweat of his brow. Well, I'll tell you this much,
Davey, you'll not get a penny of my money to throw to the winds. If you
were a good son, a hardworking, industrious lad, y' might be sure of it,
but if you were fifty times flesh of my flesh, you'd not get a penny to
go to the devil with."

"Donald! Donald!" Mary Cameron laid a hand on her husband's coat. "Don't
speak to the boy like that," she cried. "You know he's a good lad, that
he's worked hard for years."

He pushed her away.

"Be silent!" he said harshly. "You've held y're tongue, though you must
have known what's been going on--that he's got into these brawling,
roistering ways. McNab told me about them--said that I'd be blaming him
when I found out, if he didn't tell me himself. You've screened and
hidden the boy."

"Leave mother out of it," Davey said.

"Davey!" she besought him.

"It's all right, mother," he turned from her, impatiently. "We've got to
have this out now and be done with it. I'm not going on as I have done.
This is what I've got to say."

He eyed Donald Cameron squarely.

"Since I left school four years ago, I've worked on this place--worked
harder than two men. And what have I got for it--wages? No. Abuse?
Stacks of it! And you're making money, hand over fist."

The contempt in his eyes deepened.

"I know what your bank says. I know what the countryside says about
Donald Cameron's money. You're the richest man this side of the
ranges....

"But how do we live? You go about in old clothes as if you hadn't a
penny to bless yourself with; and I might be anybody's rouseabout for
the look of me. Never a penny leaks out of your pockets if you can help
it. There's none in them to leak out of mine. Don't you know what people
are saying about us? Haven't you heard anybody say: 'There go Cameron
and his son! Old Cameron is as mean as they make 'em, and Young Davey's
a chip of the old block!' It was hearing that got me down. What's the
good of your money to you? What's the good of it to mother? What's the
good of it to me? Because you worked hard for it in the beginning, is
that any reason why you should hang on to it, when you've got it--be
afraid to spend it?

"I might just as well be dead as working always with nothing else in the
world to think of but work--always under your thumb, screwed down--not
allowed to have a mind of my own. I'd rather get a job on the roads and
be free, and have a few shillings in my pocket."

Donald Cameron's face was set.

"I've said my say," he said.

"And I've said my say," cried Davey.

"Johnson'll have charge from to-morrow an' you'll work under him."

"You'll give me wages--pay me the same as the rest of the men?" Davey
asked, his eyes bright with anger.

"No."

Cameron hesitated. Something of the justice of the boy's point of view
reached him. But there was more involved than a mere recognition of
justice. It meant the breaking of a will. And it was foreign to his mind
to yield; his obstinacy was the habit of a lifetime.

"You're my son--not a hired labourer on the place," he said. "I've fed
and clothed you all your days. You'll have food and clothes--and what
else I like to give you."

"And how much will that be?"

Davey eyed him narrowly.

"It won't wear a hole in y'r trousers pockets." Donald Cameron permitted
himself the grim humour, believing that he had won the day. "And it
won't encourage you to be dicing and drinking at McNab's."

His mother, more sensitive to Davey's state of mind, broke in.

"Oh," she cried, "have no more of this talking now I Sit down and eat
your supper, Davey. It'll all be cold."

"Stick to your money!" Davey yelled. "I won't be fed and clothed by you
any longer. I'll earn my own living somewhere else." He strode out of
the room. His mother heard him go across the flagged floor of the
kitchen.

"Go out after him, Donald. Call him back," she urged.

"No," said Cameron slowly.

Davey's defiance was a shock to him. He had ruled his little world
autocratically. His will had been law. He had not believed that Davey
would dare to resist it.

"If he goes of his own will--let him come back of it," he said.

"Oh, go after him, Donald," she cried. "You've driven him to it, you,
with your harshness."

She ran to the door; but already the beat of hoofs was flying up from
the misty depths of the trees.

"Davey! Davey! Davey!" she called.

She ran down the track calling him.

But Davey was beyond her voice, or the sound of his horse's hoofs and
the hot blood in his ears dulled the echo of his name that floated down
to him.

When Mary went indoors again Donald Cameron was sitting in his chair,
the fire had gone out of his eyes, leaving him dull and vacant.

"You've been harsh with him, Donald," she said. "It's all true what he
says. You have worked him like a navvy, and never given him enough
pocket money to keep him in tobacco even. It's hard on him when the
Morrison boys and the Rosses have their own money to spend, and
everybody saying we're better off than any of the people about. You
wouldn't have stood so much yourself at his age."

"Whist, woman," he said pettishly, his head bent, as if he were trying
to catch the sound of distant hoof-beats. "Of course you'd take sides
with him!"

"Oh Donald, isn't it yourself in him that's making him like this," she
cried. "Isn't it your own blood speaking in all his high-handed ways?
What did you think your son would be to take the sort of treatment
you've given him from any man--even his own father? You should have
stayed on the farm in the old country if you'd wanted that sort of man
for a son. If you hadn't wanted Davey to have a high spirit you should
never have come over the sea here. You shouldn't have had me to come
with you for his mother...."

Donald Cameron dropped into his chair. His face was grey and lined, as
if the light behind it were extinguished.

"Be quiet, will you not, woman," he said.

"I will not!" There was a spark in her eyes. "I've got to say what I'm
thinking, now, Donald Cameron. I've held my tongue long enough. You've
had your way, and I've hardly dared to breathe when you spoke, for
years. Your always laying your will on people crushes the spirit in
them! The dominating way you have wants to lay down everything before
it. But I'm glad you've not crushed Davey--though it's breaking my heart
to think of his going away from us. I'd rather have it than see him grow
into the creeping, crawling thing Nat Johnson is. Davey's got in him
what brought you and me here. I'm glad he's got that spirit. There's no
fear in it--it goes straight forward. You've grown old and I've grown
old," she continued breathlessly. "We've lost all our fire, but he's got
it--it's going on in him. And you with your old ideas--you don't like
it--but he's got to be free--he's got to go his own way--he's got to
break his own earth, Donald."

Donald Cameron moved restively.

"It's from his mother he's taken his liking for clacking words, then,"
he said.

She fell back from him with a little desperate gesture that she had made
so little headway against the stone-wall of his mind.

"Will you not go after him to Wirreeford and get him to come home
again?" she asked pitifully. "He is a clever lad. He'll be a credit and
joy to us yet, if you'll only give him his head for a bit, Donald. This
at McNab's doesn't mean anything; it's only to put you right with the
people here, really--and because he's troubled in his mind about
something else!"

"What do you mean?"

His eyebrows twitched, his sharp eyes settled on her.

"There's a girl on his mind," she replied hesitatingly.

"Jess Ross?" he asked. "I'd fixed in my mind for him to marry her."

"Well," there was the glimmer of a smile in her eyes. "It's not Jessie
that Davey's got fixed in his mind to marry, so perhaps it's just as
well you should be away from each other for a while."

"One of the Wirree girls--lag's daughters, every one of them!"

His fingers drummed on the arm of his chair.

A shade of sadness had fallen on Mrs Cameron's face.

"Well ... you--you won't get Davey to come home, or let me try?" she
asked, her heart fainting at her own words.

"No." He repeated the word slowly as if in fear that his tongue would
give effect to other stirrings of his brain. "Of his own will he
went--of his own will he'll come back again."

"Would you have in like circumstances?" she asked.

He did not reply.

"He's our only one, Donald," she pleaded.

"He's my son. But what's the meaning of these?" he said, shuffling the
handful of McNab's papers Davey had thrown down. "Did I ever make bills
like this for myself? Haven't I worked and slaved year in and year out.
Did I ever throw away roistering what he has?"

Mary looked at the bills. She had not seen them before.

"Oh," she said, slowly, "that's the bad blood of me in him. My people
were all a spendthrift lot, and I've never been able to keep anything at
all myself, whether it was love, or money, or a shawl, or even a spirit
of my own to go through my life with."

She picked up the tray with Davey's untouched meal on it, and went out
of the room.




CHAPTER XXVII


A sou'wester was tearing across the plains, threatening to sweep the
whole Wirree township off its foundations and dash the fragments of the
mud houses against the hills. It broke round the Black Bull with the
noise of great guns, and in the pauses of its blowing the booming of the
sea on the beaches five miles away could be heard.

When Davey burst open the door he brought a gust of wind into the
tap-room that set the lights sputtering and flaring. Two of them went
out. The glasses on McNab's bench danced as he hammered it with his
fists.

"For two pins I'd thrash you," he yelled. "You got me into borrowing
money from you. I was a blamed young fool! But what's your game? What do
you mean playing fair to me and then giving me away to the old man. A
neat way of bleeding him, that's what it was. Getting me in here drunk
and then--"

The Schoolmaster was playing cards with a couple of men on an upturned
box behind the door. He threw down his cards and took Davey's arm.

The boy threw it off.

"Leave me alone, Mr. Farrel," he cried. "I'd sweep the floor with
the--the damned swine, if he were worth sweeping the floor with. You're
all afraid of him. Well, I'm not! You see here, Mister McNab," he leant
across the bar and his eyes burnt their way into the pale shifty eyes of
Thad McNab. "I'll break every bone in your body if you ever interfere
between me and mine again. D'you hear that? I don't know what you've got
up your sleeve, and I don't care! You just keep it there, see, or it'll
be the worse for you."

McNab had blenched at the boy's headlong passion. The quivering long
arms seemed scarcely able to keep themselves off his miserable
shoulders.

His skin was the gingery colour of his hair, and though he grinned
feebly, looking everywhere but at Davey, there was not a man who did not
see he was trembling. Thad McNab was a coward, everybody knew that.
There was nothing in the world he feared more than the vengeance which
might wreak itself on his miserable body. As Young Davey stamped out of
the bar there was a rustle of movement, smothered oaths of surprise and
amusement, a swinging of eyes after him with something of admiration and
applause in them; but McNab was recovering himself. He gazed
speechlessly after the boy too; there was a ghost of a smile on his
face. His mind was working; his lips moved though no words came. The men
who had wanted to cheer Young Davey shifted their opinions uneasily.
There would be more to score to McNab's account yet, they imagined.

The Schoolmaster did not follow Davey out of the bar as he felt inclined
to; but when the boy had gone McNab looked across at him.

"That's what comes of interferin', Farrel," he said.

"You'll know better another time, won't you, McNab," the Schoolmaster
drawled, looking up from the cards he was holding. "It's a bad business
getting between father and son."

McNab's smile changed.

"I was alludin' to your interferin' when I had a bit of business on
hand, Mr. Farrel," he snarled.

"Had you a bit of business on, Thad?" the Schoolmaster asked. "Who with?
Davey? And did I interfere? Well, now you beat me! Out with it! Let's
hear all about it. We're all old friends here."

McNab's wrath surged so that he could not speak.

"There now!" Farrel cried. "He won't tell! Never mind, McNab, you came
off very well! When Young Davey came in I thought he'd have you out on
the road for a certainty, and he's a pretty bruiser. Showed him how to
put up his fists myself a couple of years ago."

It was Dan's way of saying things, with a whimsicality, an inimitable
geniality, tinged with sarcasm, that brought the house down.

When the men in the bar threw back their heads and stretched their lungs
that night, Thad did not laugh. He stood, shivering, with gimlet flames
in his eyes, his fingers twitching restlessly. There were drinks all
round and the Schoolmaster played another rubber before he swung out of
the shanty and into the wind that roared and beat over the plains.

Davey was waiting in the lee of the garden fence round Farrel's cottage,
his little red mare set with her haunches against the wind.

"What is it, Davey?" the Schoolmaster asked when he saw him.

"It's this, Mr. Farrel," Davey said, on a short breath, "I've quarrelled
with the old man. I want a job."

The cottage was in darkness. But after he had taken Davey to the stable
and they had turned Red into it, they went indoors, and a light gleamed
from the small square windows until the sky was waning on the edge of
the plains. Then Davey came to the door and the Schoolmaster with him.

"It's not advice--as I told you--but a job I'm wanting," the boy said.
His voice carried against the wind, hoarse with anger and
disappointment.

"But this job, Davey, you know what it is."

The Schoolmaster's voice was troubled.

"Yes, I know--haven't I told you. As a matter of fact I haven't the
price of food or a bed on me, and I'm not going back for it. You said
these cattle of Maitland's in the yards would have to be taken to the
hills. Maitland's got fattening paddocks up beyond Steve's, hasn't he?
Tim and Pat Kearney have cleared off to the new rush, and you said you'd
have to get somebody to take them for Conal."

"You can have what money--" the Schoolmaster began.

"It wasn't what I asked for," Davey said curtly.

None knew better than Farrel what the difficulties of his getting work
of any sort would be in the Wirree with McNab's mark against him. In the
hills no one would employ him for fear of offending Donald Cameron. But
it was neither McNab, nor Donald Cameron, the Schoolmaster was thinking
of when he tried to persuade the boy to go home. Not a word moved Davey
from his purpose to be independent.

"If you take this mob to-morrow, you will clear out then and look for
another job on the other side of the ranges?"

"Yes," Davey said eagerly.

"Right," the Schoolmaster replied, "but I don't want you in this
business with Conal, Davey."

The boy gripped his hand.

"You said if ever I was hard-up for a friend," he said, "to come to you.
And this job with those beasts of Maitland's is the only thing sticking
out for me just now."

Farrel turned away wearily.

"I'd be glad enough to stand by you always, Davey," he said. "But this
is different! I'd never forgive myself if I got you into a mess.
However, it can't do any harm your taking these beasts to Steve's.
Deirdre and I'll be going up in a day or two. I'll tell Conal about it.
Then you can go on over the ranges. There's always work on Middleton's
or Yaraan. Come in now and I'll make you a cup of tea."

Davey glanced at the lightening dome of the sky.

"It's a couple of hours to dawn yet," he said, with a sigh. "Then I'll
be going."




CHAPTER XXVIII


Conal himself, on the road, met Davey behind Maitland's slowly moving,
scraggy, high-ribbed cattle.

"What's the meaning of this?" he asked, striding into Farrel's kitchen.
"That kid of Cameron's--"

"Wanted a job," the Schoolmaster said. "He's quarrelled with his
father."

"Does he know the game?"

The Schoolmaster nodded, staring over his pipe into the fire.

Conal threw off his hat. His eyes were blazing. The breath throbbed
against the bare throat down which his beard climbed.

"Do you mean to say, you--"

The Schoolmaster's eye on his, halted his tongue.

"No. I don't mean to," he said slowly. He knocked the ash from his pipe.
"By the way, Conal, who fixed the brands on that red bull? You know the
beast I mean--small, square, blazed-face, sold in Port Southern last
sales."

"I did."

Fighting Conal threw himself into a chair.

"Badly done," the Schoolmaster murmured, gazing before him. "He, Young
Davey, twigged it. He's been holding his tongue--for what reason I don't
know--but he told me because he wanted this job. I gave it to him.
Thad's got his knife into him."

"Then why on earth did you want to take him on and get Thad on our
tracks?"

"Don't take orders from Thad yet, do you, Conal?"

Conal fidgeted under that glint in Dan's eye.

"No," he growled, "you know I don't, but there's no good I can see in
running against him. What does this kid want anyhow? Why, there's more
than a dozen of Cameron's cows in the mob I'm after now."

The log that had been smouldering all day on the open hearth broke and
fell with a shattering of embers.

"Tell you the truth, Conal," the Schoolmaster looked straight out before
him. "There's something in McNab's eyes tells me he's got his
suspicions--well, if he has--it's time to get out. You've had luck so
far. But there's something about McNab keeps making me feel as if he
were promising himself something on my account, saying to himself:
'There's something coming to you!' Of course he thinks I'm in this
business with you."

Conal shifted his position and swore impatiently.

"I'd better keep out of your way--that's what it amounts to, Dan!"

"No," the Schoolmaster said, "not that! Let McNab think what he likes as
far as I'm concerned. Only he hasn't any particular quarrel with you,
Conal, and he has with me--and if he tripped you up trying to get at me
it would be a bad business."

Conal leant forward.

"Things are tightening up north, too?" he said, "I mean to quit, Dan.
Maitland knows I do his business--and a little bit extra on my own
account. That doesn't worry him so long as he gets a fancy price for the
beasts. I want to pull off this last 'lift' and then turn the game down
altogether. I wish you were in this with me though you've never been in
any but square jobs before. I've been spying out the land--took a short
cut from Rane and got into the back hills. Sent Tim and Pat on with
those scrags of Maitland's! Picked up Teddy at Steve's. There's not much
he doesn't know about the ways of scrub cattle. Trust a black! He took
me down Narrow Valley to the plains. We laid a couple of hours under
cover in the dark. Then the moon rose, and you should've seen the mob go
stringin' out across the plains--lookin' no more than a drove of rats in
the dim light. It's a pretty good bunch, rollin' fat--and prices high. I
mean to pick it up. Wouldn't 've known anything about it but for
you--it's out of my beat. You ought to have a whack of the profits,
Dan."

Both men were silent for a few moments. Only the fire creaked in the
quiet room.

"When I'm through with this bit of work, I'll get out and set up on the
respectable somewhere. We could take up a couple of hundred acres on our
own account, you and me," Conal murmured; "go to church, wear
long-tailed coats, ring-on some fancy speechifyin'. Me 'n Deirdre'd sing
in the choir. When this is all through, there's something I'll want to
be saying to you, Dan."

There was another moment's dreaming silence. The Schoolmaster spoke with
a sudden resolution.

"No," he said. "Do what you like yourself, Conal, but I made up my mind
long ago not to have anything to do with 'cross' jobs. I'm not in this.
I don't want to be--and I'll have nothing to do with the proceeds."

"You call, Dan!" Conal rose from his seat by the fire with a gesture of
disappointment. "It'll be full moon to-morrow night and I'm goin' to
make a dash for 'm. Teddy and I ran up a yard near the old hut in Narrow
Valley. That's what's been keeping me. Steve's goin' to send tucker and
fire-irons down to-day."

"What about young Cameron?" the Schoolmaster asked.

"We'll have to keep an eye on him. You don't suppose he'll blab, do you?
You say he knows the game already and hasn't. But we can't afford to
take chances."

"But he's not to be dragged in, Conal!"

Conal threw back his head, laughing.

"Well, I want another man," he said. "As for being dragged in, he won't
be dragged in. But did you ever hear of a youngster who'd sit behind the
door and suck his thumbs while there was moonlighting in the air? It
won't be a case of draggin' him in, but keepin' him out. After all, it's
the sport makes it worth while--the waiting, rush, fight and carryin'
through of things."

He stretched his long limbs.

"But I won't have Davey 'working' with you, Conal," the Schoolmaster
said angrily.

Deirdre came into the room, a little bonnet over her head and a long
black cloak covering her. There was a wild colour the wind had whipped
into them in her cheeks and her eyes were shining.

"You, Conal!" she cried eagerly when she saw the tall figure of the
drover. "When did you get back?"

Conal saw only her shining eyes and the fluttering line of her mouth. He
stood stock-still staring at her. It did not occur to his simple mind to
ask whether it was for him her eyes were shining. Only that glad and
eager note in her voice pleased him.

The Schoolmaster had heard people say that Deirdre was beautiful; but
she had never seemed more beautiful than she was this evening, when she
came out of the gloom, bringing into the quiet room and across the
threshold of his troubled thoughts, her youth and buoyancy of spirit,
the whole secret and subtle essence of her femininity in bloom.

"Oh I--I've just got back and came to see your father at once, Deirdre,"
was all Conal could say.

"Did you have a good trip?" she asked, taking off her hat and coat.

He wondered how much of his enterprise she knew. But there was no shadow
on her face.

"Yes, all right," he said, a little awkwardly.

"I saw Mrs. Cameron at the store, father," she continued, busy with her
own thoughts, and turning over in her mind what Mrs. Cameron had said to
her, what she had said to Mrs. Cameron, and the plot, light as a
spider's web, that they had woven between them for Davey's benefit.

"And as I was coming along home," she laughed blithely, "who did I meet
on the road but Pat Glynn! And he put this little parcel into my hand,
and said that he had been told to give it to me. He made me promise not
to open it until I got in, too!"

She tore the wrappings of brown paper and newspaper from a little brown
box, opened it and drew out a heavy, old-fashioned necklace made of
links and twists of gold, with a locket set with rubies and pearls at
the end of it.

"Oh, isn't it pretty!" she cried.

The Schoolmaster stared at it, and on Conal's face a thunder-cloud of
resentment gathered.

"Who did he tell you sent it?" the Schoolmaster asked.

"He wouldn't say--only that it was from a 'devoted admirer.'"

"Have you any idea who it's from?" Dan asked, anger and anxiety
struggling within him.

Deirdre looked up at Conal.

"It's not from you, Conal?" she asked, hesitatingly.

He shook his head.

"Perhaps it was Davey?"

She looked at the Schoolmaster.

"No," he said, "Davey had no money, I know, so he couldn't have sent it.
You've no idea of any one else?"

"No." The light had gone from her face.

Conal seized his hat. His mouth set in an ugly line.

"I'll go and see Pat," he said.

The door slammed behind him.

Deirdre stood looking down on the glimmering thing in her hand.

"You're not to wear it, Deirdre," the Schoolmaster said harshly. Her
eyes flew to his. He caught a reflection of his own spirit in them.

"Do you think I'd be likely to," she said.

It was hours later when Conal slammed the door of the cottage again. The
suppressed rage in him burned to white ash.

"He's gone--Pat Glynn!" he said angrily. "I've ransacked the place for
him. He's melted into thin air. I've been out along the Rane road and
half way into the Port; but he's done the disappearing trick. There's
not a track of him anywhere."




CHAPTER XXIX


"So you're goin' to Steve's, Deirdre?"

It was Thad McNab who spoke. He stood on the doorstep in the sunshine,
his yellow face thrust through the doorway, the pale eyes in it,
smiling.

Deirdre was putting the last of her ribbands, handkerchiefs and little
personal belongings into a small canvas saddle-bag. McNab's voice
startled her. She glanced across at him.

"Yes," she said. The sight of his crooked figure there, in the doorway,
with the sunlight playing across it, brought her a sense of uneasy
wondering.

Quite suddenly, the night before, Farrel had decided to go up to the
hills with Conal in the morning. He had told Deirdre to follow them as
soon as she had set the cottage in order and collected her clothes. She
wanted to go with them, but there were a hundred and one things to keep
her busy in the house--dishes to scour, floors to sweep, covers and
crockery to lock away in the cupboards. She had just quenched the fire.
The ashes were smoking behind her, under the water she had poured over
them, when McNab appeared. The township was well astir by this time. The
Schoolmaster had talked of going to Steve's for long enough; she did not
expect anyone to be surprised at it. He did not seem to expect that
anyone would be surprised either, though he had made up his mind rather
suddenly the night before, and had told her to ride out quietly and
without chattering to anyone in the morning.

Yet McNab seemed surprised and annoyed. She wondered how he knew so soon
that the Schoolmaster had gone with Conal. It was very early. The
sunshine was still of an untarnished brilliance. Mrs. Mary Ann's ducks
and geese were making their first trip in wavering white and mottled
lines to the shallow pools left by the tide beside the river. Deirdre
could see them through the open doorway.

"Mighty sudden the Schoolmaster made up his mind, eh, my blackbird?"
Thad said, with, what for him was geniality, though geniality on his
voice had a sour sound.

He shuffled into the room and stood near her.

Deirdre folded a ribband and packed it into her bag. She made a great
appearance of being busy, going to and from the kitchen and the
cupboards, wrapping up and putting into the bag all manner of things
that she had not meant to take, in order that she might not be still to
look at, or to talk to McNab. She did not want him to see how the sight
of him had set her heart throbbing, a little nervous pulse fluttering in
her throat. His nearness filled her with a sick fear, but she would not
have had McNab guess it. She knew the shrewd sharpness of those pale,
shifty eyes of his. Her eyes met his clearly. There was not a flicker of
the smooth, white lids above them.

"Oh, no," she said, "he'd fixed to go to-day, sometime ago."

"Well, he might 've said so," replied McNab. "There was something I
wanted to talk to him about, something--partic'lar."

"Can I tell him what it is?"

His eyes fell before the clear innocence of her gaze. He moved uneasily.

"No," he said, "I dursay I'll find time to go and see him up at Steve's
one of these days. Tell him that ... I'll come soon." He chuckled a
moment. "They tell me," he went on, eyeing her narrowly, "they tell me,
he's taken that cub of Cameron's with him."

He did not wait for her reply, but ran on, the malice that was never far
from it an undercurrent in his voice again.

"He's not very clever, your father, my dear, for all he's a
Schoolmaster, or he wouldn't have done that! Give him my respects and
say I hope the hills'll be for the good of his health. And you--I hope
you'll be enjoyin' y'rself up there. Though it's no place, to be buryin'
the most beautiful woman in the South."

"Well, I'll have to be going now!" Deirdre moved quickly.

He had edged nearer and nearer her, until his breath touched her face as
she pulled the strings of her bag together.

"Socks has been saddled this half hour. Father'll be glad to see you any
day at Steve's, I'm sure, Mr. McNab," she added, backing towards the
door.

McNab got between her and it. He put his hand on her arm.

"My, the pretty neck it is," he gurgled, his voice deep in his throat.
"But where's the gold chain Pat Glynn told me he had for you from
a--'devoted admirer,' no less. A gold chain it was, with rubies and
pearls on it--fit for a lady to wear! And there's more for you, where it
come from. The one that sent it would dress you up like the finest lady
in the land, Pat said, if you would--"

Deirdre wrenched herself away from the clutching hands. They caught at
her again.

"You must kiss me good-bye then, pretty," he whispered.

She saw the flame in his eyes, the wry smile on his lips.

The chestnut was standing saddled, his bridle over the post by the door.
Deirdre leapt to his back, her bag in her hand.

Thad followed her out-of-doors and stood watching her, rubbing his hands
together.

"So shy, my blackbird, so shy!" he exclaimed, almost gleefully. "Never
mind. Another day, perhaps!"

Deirdre looked down at him, her eyes blazing.

"If father heard you talking like that, he'd thrash you within an inch
of your life," she cried passionately.

McNab lost countenance.

"Eh, would he?" he snarled.

The fear of death and revenge, the dealing out to himself of what he had
dealt so often to others, was the continual dogging terror that haunted
him. Then he smiled again and chuckled.

"If I let him, eh, my pretty," he said, gazing up at her. "If I let him.
I wouldn't advise you to ... to tell him ... create bad feelin' between
us ... it'd be a pity ... seeing ... me and y'r father's pretty good
friends, and they say it's better to make a friend than an enemy of
McNab. Besides it was only my little bit of fun, Deirdre. Haven't I
known you since you were--so high."

Deirdre turned the chestnut to the road.

"Good-bye, me dear," McNab called. "And my respects to the Schoolmaster,
don't forget! Tell him I think it was mean to do me the trick of
clearin' out without lettin' me know though, 'n me wantin' to stand by
him in any little bit of trouble that's comin' to him. But I'll be
comin' up to see him, soon--sooner than he thinks--p'raps."

There was a warning, a veiled threat, in the words.

As the chestnut flew out along the green roadsides, that mean voice with
its geniality and thin-edged malice, reverberated in Deirdre's ears. She
looked back when she was some distance out on the flat road that wound
over the plains to the hills, and saw McNab hobbling back towards the
whitewashed irregular and dilapidated huts of the Wirree township. Her
eyes went out to the ranges with an eager sigh. She quickened the
chestnut's pace again with a rub of her heels on his sleek side.




CHAPTER XXX


Deirdre's spirits rose as White Socks climbed the steep track of the
foothills. She drew the strong, sweet leafy smells of the trees with
eager breaths. Tying her hat to the saddle, she threw back her head to
the sunshine, exclaiming with delight to see the red and brown
prickly-shrub blossom out among the ferns, sunlight making the young
leaves hang upon the saplings in flakes of translucent green, ruddy-gold
and amber.

She talked to Socks and called to the birds that flitted across the
track. It was so good to be in the hills again, climbing the long,
winding path through the trees. She wanted to catch the sunshine in her
hands; it hung in such yarns of palpable gold stuff across the track.
She sang softly to herself, gazing into the blue haze that stood among
the near trees.

The valleys were steeped in sun mists. Her little horse ambled easily
through them, and when he climbed the steep hill sides, she slipped from
his back and walked beside him, asking him again and again, if it were
not good to be going to Steve's, to the paddocks where Socks himself had
flung up his heels an unbroken colt, and all the gay, careless days of
her childhood had been spent. She felt as if they were leaving the reek
and squalor of the Wirree River for ever.

And yet the vague uneasiness McNab's words had evoked hovered in her
mind. His eyes, gestures, ugly writhing smile, kept recurring to her.
She was anxious to get to the Schoolmaster and give him McNab's message,
to know what he would make of it. What harm was it McNab could do her
father? She knew that Dan feared him, in a curious, watchful way. And
the trouble that was coming to him. What had McNab meant by that? This
business Conal was on, what was it? Why had she been told nothing about
it? The way McNab had talked to her, too, disquieted her.

All day a premonition of trouble haunted her. She urged the chestnut on.
When they splashed through a creek at midday, she let him stand for a
few minutes in the middle of it, dip his patchy white nose into the
clear, cold water, and sough it up noisily. A little further on, near a
gully in which the mists were unfathomable, the trees, grey as sea
lichen in its depths, she sat down by the roadside and ate her sandwich
of bread and cheese and had a drink from her bottle of milk.

Davey and she had often made excursions to Long Gully when they were
children to hear the bell-birds. They dropped mellow notes through the
stillness of the trees that climbed the gully's steep sides. Davey and
she had crept warily through the undergrowth, on the look-out for
snakes, and had sat still for hours behind a fallen tree, listening for
the plomp, plomp, plomp of the shy birds' notes of purest melody thrown
into the pool of the silence.

A dead tree stood near the edge of the track. Deirdre remembered that
there had been a magpie's nest in it, and that the "maggies" would swoop
down on her and on Davey in the springtime, if there were young birds in
the nest, screaming and flapping their wings, and sometimes getting in a
peck which brought the blood to her freckled face or to Davey's. She
glanced up to see if the magpies were about that day; but they were not.

So gaunt and tall the dead tree stood. Its branches seemed to strike
against the sky. They rattled with the sound of bones in the wind. The
sun and thrashing winter storms had bleached it, and there were black
wales and scars where a fire had eaten into the wood above the hacked
zone that the axe of a settler had made when he ring-barked it years
ago. As long as she could remember the dead tree had stood there, gaunt
and ghostly, with the tangle of living trees behind it. They were clad
with their shifting, whispering garment of leaves all the year round,
and decked with flowers in the springtime. But the dead tree was naked.
It might have been an avenging spirit of the wilderness, it stood with
an air of such tragic desolation by the wayside.

There were dead trees all along the hill roads; scores of them in the
paddocks. The ripping crack and thunder of their crashing to the earth
could be heard in the dead of night sometimes. When they thought of it,
country folk moved from under a dead tree. Deirdre looked up at this
one. It seemed to waver in the wind. She shook the crumbs from her
skirt, and caught the chestnut's bridle.

Scarlet-runners were overhanging the bank on that turn of the road, near
where the school had been, when she passed. The chimney of the hut was
still standing, though the wild creepers had thrown long vines about it.
Supple-jack had clambered over the half-dozen twisted fruit trees; it
threw its shower of feathery, seeding thistle-down over the dark-leafed
apple branches.

Deirdre had meant to take Socks into the clearing, and let him feed on
the wild oats and clover matting it, while she investigated the forlorn
chimney and the fruit trees and flowers growing near where her garden
had been, seeking in the tangled undergrowth for the flowers she had
planted long ago. She had thought she would sit on the edge of the well,
listen for the great green frogs to go dropping into the water, and
weave her dreams of the old times for awhile, watching the sunlight make
a patchwork of dancing light with the shadows the leaves of the fruit
trees cast on the beaten yard about the doorway of the hut. But she went
straight by with scarcely a glance at the grey chimney and the tangled
garden greenery, across which a tall, sweet English rose nodded gaily.
She only stopped a moment to pull a trail of scarlet-runners from the
bank near the house.

She wondered if Davey had remembered the place and the flowers when he
passed the day before. She looked down at the scarlet flowers with a
little smile, as she pinned them into her dress.

But thought of the flowers and of Davey lasted only a moment. She was
eager to ask the Schoolmaster for an explanation, and to hear from him
what they had to fear from McNab.

When she saw Dan, with the sun behind him, coming towards her on his big
grey nag, whose nose was so like a kangaroo's that they called him "the
'Roo," she quickened her pace, her heart swelling with love at the sight
of him, and at the thought of the concern which had sent him back along
the road to meet her.

She lifted her face to his with a breathless little glad sob when she
came up to him.

"What is it?" he asked, his anxiety leaping instinctively at the sight
of her face.

"Perhaps I'm foolish," she said quickly. "It's something McNab said
before I left this morning. It wasn't so much what he said, but the way
he said it. And I've been thinking of it all the way--wondering what he
meant. Is there any harm he could do us?"


"What did he say?" Farrel asked.

"He came just as I was going," Deirdre told him, "and he seemed annoyed
that you didn't tell him you were going to-day--said there was something
particular he wanted to talk to you about. Then just as I was going, he
said: 'It was a mean trick clearin' out without lettin' me know--such
old friends as we are too, and me wanting to stand by him in any little
bit of trouble that's coming to him. But I'll be coming up to see him
one of these days soon--sooner than he thinks p'raps.' It wasn't so much
what he said as the way he said it, made me think--"

Deirdre hesitated, looking at her father's face. She knew that he was
troubled, that there was enough in this to disturb him without telling
him what else McNab had said to her.

They rode on in silence, the horses brushing.

The Schoolmaster's head was bent in thought. He rode in easy, slouching,
negligent fashion, and seemed to have forgotten he was not alone.
Deirdre spoke first. Her voice had a quick, low-toned intensity.

"I made up my mind on the way, to-day, to ask you what this business is
Conal's on, and if you are with him, or not?" she said. "I ought to
know. I'm not a child, and I'm with you whatever it is. I have an idea;
but you ought to tell me, more than ever now that McNab----"

"Has his suspicions."

The Schoolmaster looked into her steady eyes.

"Are you in this with Conal?" she asked.

"I wasn't until last night," he said. "I changed my mind suddenly and
joined him."

"What made you?" she inquired breathlessly.

He did not reply.

"I know--it was that necklace!" The reason had come to her instantly.

"I'm a good-for-nothing now, Deirdre," he said low and bitterly.
"There's mighty little I can do ... and there'll be less presently. I
want enough money to get us away from here--and keep us by and by
when--"

He did not say it, but she knew that he meant when the night of
blindness had fallen on him.

"It was because you were afraid for me," she murmured. "Afraid because
of that necklace, who it might have come from, afraid--"

He nodded.

"And if you get the money we can go away from here and never come back
to the Wirree River any more?"

The Schoolmaster smiled. He was surprised at the eagerness of her voice.

"Yes," he said, "but that was what was bothering me. I thought you would
not like to be leaving the place. You were always wanting to come back
when we were away before."

"Oh," a little fluttering sigh went out of her, "but I'll be glad to go
now! Tell me what you're going to do?"

"There's moonlight to-night, and we want to get a mob of wild cattle,"
he said quietly. "A couple of hundred are eating their heads off in the
scrub above Narrow Valley. Do you remember when we were living here,
riding up the range, sometimes we'd start a cow, or steer, and it would
plunge away through the brushwood, scared as a rabbit! After the fires
more breakaways joined the mob. We lost a couple of cows--- so did
Steve--others did too. Well, I told Conal about these beasts a while
ago. He made up his mind to get them. He and Steve's black boy 've run
up a stockyard near McMillan's hut in Narrow Valley, and Conal and he
mean to take the mob with that lot of Maitland's cattle he brought down
for fattening, not this, but last trip, up by the Snowy River into New
South Wales."

"It isn't as you may say, permitted by law," he continued. "But most of
the cattle men who can do it, do--even the squatters when they get a
chance. Down here they don't think scrub cattle worth the getting.
Rosses staked a couple of horses a month or two ago, and lost a good dog
after this mob. Cameron doesn't think them worth his while, so why
shouldn't we have them if we can get them. If we get a couple of beasts
with brands on them, among the wild ones, it may be worth drafting them
out and driving them back to the hills. But the hair grows thick on
scrub cattle; there's no need to be brand hunting. If Conal weren't such
a fine stockman, we couldn't do it. There's nobody like him.

"When we pull off this deal, we'll go away, you and Conal and I. If the
price of cattle keeps up there'll be enough to divide among the three of
us--Davey's got to have his share if he's in. Conal's offered him a
third to work with him to-night, and run the mob through to the border.
He's a man short. I've been trying to persuade Davey to keep out of
it--but there's a lot of Donald Cameron in him--he's as obstinate as a
mule. Says he wants a job, and has got one, and that's enough for him
for the present."

They had come within sight of Steve's shanty on the brow of the hill.

When they drew rein before Steve's, Conal lounged out of the house. The
dogs that had started up snarling at the approach of horses stretched
themselves again in the dust by the verandahs, and lay with their heads
low on their forelegs. Deirdre stood a moment looking about her. Her
face, under the flat little yellow straw hat crossed by a red ribband
that tied under her chin, was very winsome, her eyes bright with tears
and laughter. When she saw Steve in the doorway, she ran to him and
threw her arms around him.

"Oh, it's good to be here again, Uncle Stevie," she-cried.

He chuckled delightedly.

"There's a woman you are, Deirdre. A woman y've grown!"

"What else would I grow?" she asked gaily.

"It's good to be anywhere you are, Deirdre!" Conal said, coming up and
standing beside them, all his love in his eyes.

She laughed, glancing up at him, and Steve laughed to see the way the
wind blew. Davey by the open door, watched them; but Deirdre did not see
him.

When she moved to go in, he stood away from the door for her to pass. He
saw the scarlet-runners that she had tucked into her gown under her
chin. She heard the catch in his breath, and hesitated.

Conal saw her hand go out to him. He saw Davey take it, but he did not
see the eyes she turned on him, nor hear her say with a tremulous quiver
of the lips:

"They're saying they're glad to see me! Will you not say so too, Davey?"

The Schoolmaster, coming back from the stables, called Conal.

"McNab's been to see Deirdre," he said. "He's got an idea something's in
the wind, she seems to think. It's just as well we fixed for to-night,
Conal. It won't give him any time to get busy. But hadn't you better be
getting down to cover before it's much later?"

"It's only a couple of miles, by the track Teddy goes. There's time
enough yet," Conal replied, his eyes on the open door, gaping dark
against the brightness of the sunshine.

Davey followed Deirdre indoors.

"Teddy's bringing in the horses now. You'd better get in and have
something to eat. Send Davey to me," Farrel said impatiently.

Conal crossed the verandah.

It was in the wide, low-roofed kitchen that he found Davey. Deirdre was
standing near him. Only the glow of the firelight lighted the great
room; but that was sufficient to show him the sombre, steadfast gaze
with which Davey regarded the girl, and something subdued in the droop
of her figure, a something of emotion, humiliation in her averted head.

"Dan wants you," he said to Davey.

Davey had stared at Deirdre as though he were trying to read in her face
what his heart ached to know, and she had been waiting for him to read
and know, waiting for the first sound of his voice with a tremulous
expectancy. A moment more might have ended the year-long griefs and
heartache between them. But Conal spoke, and Davey wheeled out of the
kitchen.

Conal strode over to the table near which Davey bad been. He swung his
leg over it, and watched Deirdre as she put cups and saucers, plates and
knives on one end of it. She cut some bread and buttered it.

There was a light in her eyes, a colour in her cheeks. She had watched
Davey go with a little gesture of impatience, a fluttering sigh. Conal
saw that. She turned to him gaily, poured out tea for him, chattering,
but avoided his eyes. He watched her with a smouldering suspicion.

Suddenly he leant forward and caught her hand. His swart, leathern face
swung towards her; the brilliant, hawk eyes of Conal, the Fighter, leapt
into hers.

"You're to marry me, Deirdre," he said, his voice hoarse and throbbing
in his throat.

She shrank from him with a little breathless exclamation.

"Don't do that," he cried passionately. "Don't look at me like that,
Deirdre."

"Conal!" she gasped.

In his eyes rose the appeal of dumb, unfathomable, devouring tenderness.

"Say you'll love me ... say you will, Deirdre," he begged.

His face was turned towards her, humble and mysteriously moved, a strong
light in his eyes.

So absorbed were they that they did not hear, or if they heard, paid no
attention to the grind of wheels on the gravel before the shanty, the
yelping and snarling of dogs that announced the arrival of a vehicle at
Steve's, and such late arrivals were not usual.

"I've had my way with women. They've told you tales of me, I know,"
Conal pleaded. "But there's never a woman I've cared for but you,
Deirdre. And you--" he broke off impatiently, "there's no telling you
how I care for you. I haven't got words. Besides, it chokes me to speak
of it; raises a storm in me that there's no holding. By and by when this
is all over, we'll go away--you and the Schoolmaster and me. Oh, I'll be
a good husband. You'll give me y'r word, won't you, Deirdre?"

There were voices in the bar beyond, but they did not heed them. Conal
was thinking only of her and his pleading.

"Conal dear," Deirdre said. "If you wouldn't talk like this any more!"

Her eyes fell from his. He snatched her hand from the flower under her
chin where it had fallen.

"Is it him you love?" he asked fiercely, jerking his head in the
direction of the back door by which Davey had gone out. "Is it? Tell me.
I'll let no man come between you and me, Deirdre. I'll kill him if he
tries to."

The door from the tap-room, with the sunlight splashing on the benches
and bottles behind it, opened, and Steve and the new arrival came into
the kitchen.

"And who is it y'll be killing now, Conal?" asked McNab genially.

He glanced from Conal to Deirdre.

"You, if you don't get out of my way," yelled Conal, quivering with
rage.

Brushing past McNab, he flung out of the room, his spurs jingling. They
heard the irons on his boots click on the stones of the yard.

"There now," cried Steve tremulously. "He's been making love to you, has
he, Deirdre? All the boys'll be making love to you, Deirdre! And now
here's Mr. McNab come up to see the Schoolmaster ... most partic'lar."

He was altogether flustered at this unexpected visit of McNab's, and at
his wits' end what to say next. Dan was in the paddock with the black
boy, bringing in the horses for the night's work, and here was McNab on
the top of it all.

Deirdre's wits were quicker to work than his.

She realised what McNab's being in the shanty that night might mean to
the Schoolmaster, Conal, Davey and herself.

She smiled at him. McNab had not seen her smile like that except at
Conal, and that was on the night of the Schoolmaster's return, at the
dance at Hegarty's.

"Why there's a surprise to play on me, Mr. McNab?" she cried merrily.
"You to be coming up the hills to-day and never say a word about it this
morning. There I was, riding along by myself, and might have had a seat
in the cart beside you."

McNab hardly knew what to make of her greeting. He imagined that she had
been thinking over his attentions of the morning, and was feeling
flattered by them--for after all was he not Thadeus McNab and, the
gossips said, the richest man in the country side, not excepting Donald
Cameron himself, if the truth were known. He thought that she was
willing to coquet with him, and that, too, the hint about the gold chain
might not have been in vain.

He warmed to her smile, preened himself and gave himself half a dozen
gallant airs on the spot. Every male instinct in him responded to her
effort to be charming.

"And now everybody's had tea but me," she continued. "So we can just sit
down and have some together."

McNab sat down beside her at the big table on which she had spread a
white cloth.

A generous and genial glow suffused him. For the moment he forgot the
reason of his visit. Deirdre had put it all out of his head with that
smile of hers. The sound of her merry voice set every fibre of him
tingling and thrilling as his fibres had never tingled and thrilled
before.




CHAPTER XXXI


In the yard Conal told the Schoolmaster of McNab's arrival.

"Settles us," Farrel said shortly. "That's what he came to do. And we
can't afford to let him think there's anything on. He's given his
suspicions to M'Laughlin most likely and the delay to-night'll give them
time to get the word out about us along the road. So all we can do is
lie low, play civil to McNab, let him think he's on the wrong track.
Then when this blows over--in a couple of months, perhaps--"

Conal swore bitterly.

"I could have wrung his neck when I saw him. It was all I could do to
keep me hands off him," he said.

"Don't be giving the game away, Conal," the Schoolmaster cautioned.
"Mind, we're not taking chances."

"It'll be a couple of hours to moonrise after dark," Conal said
restively, glancing at the waning sky. "If you could keep him busy,
playing cards and drinking--let him think we weren't upset at seeing him
and he Seems to be settlin' down and looking foolish findin' we're all
about--I might walk out after a bit. I could get the beasts, with Davey
and that blithering half-breed. Sally's easily worth a couple of men
with cattle."

"Do you think I'm likely to be able to keep McNab so busy, he wouldn't
notice you were walking out?" the Schoolmaster asked, impatiently. "You
and Davey had better come in and hang round loose presently."

He went towards the house.

His greeting of McNab was as lukewarm, negligent and friendly as it
always was. Deirdre saw no flicker of anxiety in his face. McNab's eyes
were quick and keen on it for the first few minutes, but finding no
trace of repressed excitement, not a spark of the impatience he
expected, but only a whimsical smile to convey that the Schoolmaster
knew why he had come, and was amused at the reason, he dropped into the
chair he had taken and sought to cover the unexpectedness of his visit
by unusual affability.

He was sitting in Steve's chair by the fire when Farrel came into the
room that was kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, and living-room in
general at Steve's. Deirdre slipped out with a jug for water as the
Schoolmaster came in. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw her talking to
Conal in the yard.

When she returned, her laughter and gaiety surprised him. She set a jug
of grog between Steve and McNab on the table near NcNab's elbow. The
Schoolmaster swore beneath his breath when he saw McNab's eyes on her.

He trembled with rage when he heard Deirdre talking to McNab; but her
eyes met his reassuringly. He caught their message, calm and purposeful.
He knew that she was playing the woman to McNab, and why. The knowledge
angered and humiliated him.

Davey and Conal came into the long, barely-lighted room. They threw
themselves on a bench near the door. Conal, taking a pipe from his belt,
smoked morosely. Davey did not look at McNab, and McNab took no notice
of him, enjoying his position of importance by the fireside, and
chuckling over the gay chatter Deirdre threw to him.

"We eat our heads off, up here, Mr. McNab," she said. "And sleep! Davey
and Conal there, to see them yawning over their supper to-night you'd
think they'd never seen a bed for weeks. They've been saying they're
going to turn in early because they've to go off mustering first thing
in the morning, and father and Steve would have sat here dozing by the
fire for a while, and then gone off to bed too. I was thinking I would
have to take out my sewing and talk to the cat ... till it was a decent
hour to be saying my prayers. But now p'raps you'll have a game of cards
with me, though I don't suppose Conal and Davey'll go to bed early now,
seeing we've got company."

Davey sat bolt upright against the wall. It froze the blood in his veins
to hear her on such terms of easy familiarity with McNab. Conal shifted
uneasily.

"But we can get along without them, can't we?" Deirdre asked blithely.
"There's no need for them to be sitting up trying to be polite, is
there?"

"None at all."

McNab chuckled. He thought he was getting on very well with Deirdre and
that she was playing him off against Conal and Davey in a spirit of
pique.

"Right. Good-night, McNab, see you in the morning," Conal said angrily.
He swung out of the room. Davey followed him.

"And now for the business that brought you, McNab. Mighty kind of you to
have come after me with it?"

The Schoolmaster sat down before Thad McNab, facing him squarely, his
one eye played on McNab's shifty face. There was just the faintest
ironical emphasis in his voice.

McNab stirred uneasily.

"Fact is," he began, his eyes shifted under the Schoolmaster's gaze.
"Fact is--we're wanting a school in the Wirree," he plunged desperately.
"Before you go away I thought--I thought, not knowing exactly what your
plans were, I'd have a talk to you about it. The place is gettin' a bad
name with the children growing up not able to make more than a mark for
their names. In the hills, of course, you taught the first generation,
as you might say, so the older ones can teach the others coming on, but
down there it's different. We've never had any school or school
teachers. The people can't pay enough--just a few of them--to make it
worth your while ... but if we built a school, got 'em all together ...
it might be a good thing, I'd maybe put up the money for the
school--maybe--"

He fidgeted in his seat. He did not want to commit himself too far, and
yet he was irritably conscious of the weakness of his explanation unless
he did. He had a suspicion than Dan Farrel was laughing at him up his
sleeve too. An ill-humour was rising in him.

There was an ominous silence--a moment of suspicion and suspense. A word
from either might have been a spark to the long-hidden train of enmity
between them. Deirdre broke the silence. She threw down a pack of cards
and pulled her chair up to the table.

"All that'll keep till to-morrow, Mr. McNab, won't it?" she asked. "Have
a game of euchre with Steve and me, now. Let's play cut-throat--it's
more exciting. Father can think over what you've said and tell you in
the morning."

"Yes ... yes ... you think it over, Farrel," McNab said eagerly.

He was glad enough to shelve discussion of this urgent matter which had
brought him from the Wirree to talk to the Schoolmaster, seeing that it
was not at all urgent and did not look like it.

Deirdre pushed the bottle of rum between him and Steve. She sat opposite
to them, the broad yellow glare of the dip on her face.

The liquor was already beginning to warm McNab's brain. His head was
steady enough on his shoulders; but there was a glow within him. He
watched the face of the girl before him as in a dream.

Farrel saw the arabesques of red and blue the cards made under the light
as she threw them on the table. He heard her gleeful and triumphant
exclamations. He realised what she was doing for him, was sore and
angry, but there was nothing to do but to play up to her. He sat at the
far end of the table just out of the light: after a while his head
drooped.

Deirdre's laughter flashed.

"Look at father," she cried, "he's dead with sleep!"

Farrel started and stared at her, sleepily.

"It's no good your blinking like an owl and pretending you weren't
taking forty winks. You'd better go to bed and have done with it," she
said.

He struggled to his feet.

"I'm dog-weary," he muttered. "Think I will."

"Good-night," he added after a moment. "And be sure you see the fires
are out before you turn in, Deirdre. You're not to be staying up late,
either! I won't have her getting too fond of the cards, Steve."

He stumbled across the room to the far end where a screen of brushwood
and bagging against the back of the shanty made another small room.

Deirdre laughed again.

"I'm winning all the time," she said gaily, "so they won't want to play
long."

The cards went backwards and forwards across the table to the tune of
her exclamations and the chime of her laughter, the muttered oaths and
exclamations of Steve and McNab. Steve was soggy with drink; but McNab
was not as drunk as he seemed. His eyes caught hers with a curious
expression when the Schoolmaster had gone from the room.

"And who's the man Conal's going to kill for comin' between you,
Deirdre?" he asked.

"How do I know?" she said, a little nervously.

"P'raps it's the man sent you the gold chain," McNab murmured. His eyes
glimmered at her out of the darkness. "They tell me Conal went round
like a madman looking for Pat Glynn to tell him who it was, threatening
to break the last bone in Pat's body if he wouldn't speak."

"Yes, I think it was him," Deirdre said, meeting his eyes. "Conal said
if ever he found him, he'd--"

"Conal's a hot head doesn't mean half he says," McNab muttered.

"But he means that, I'm sure," Deirdre said. "And Conal's so strong.
Look at his hands. He could put them round a man's throat and wring the
life out of it--just as easily as you wring a bird's neck, Mr. McNab.
And he's a dead shot, too, Conal--they say."

"Eh, then it's somebody's neck he'll be wringing, or somebody he'll be
shooting, for sure," McNab said. "For it's not him you'll be marrin',
and it's not him your heart's set on. It's the other."

The quivering of her face, a dilating of the pupils of her eyes that
were wells of darkness, told him that he had scored. He leant forward,
following up his advantage, eagerly.

"And it's not Conal, for all his blustering, I'm afraid of, my pretty,"
he whispered. His eyes were narrowed, the smile in them leaping across
his face. "It's not Conal, for all his blustering, though I dursay y'
think he'd kill me for love of you. And you'd break his heart for love
of somebody else--by way of reward. But it's me all the same that'll get
you."


Deirdre pushed back her chair. Then she remembered the part she had been
playing all the evening. She steadied herself, putting her hands on the
edge of the table, and looked down into McNab's eyes, laughing.

"Why," she cried, "you're as drunk as drunk, Mr. McNab! And so is Steve;
you'd better see each other to bed. I'm going myself."

She went across to the corner-room next the Schoolmaster's, where she
slept. When she had heard Steve shambling before NcNab to the room off
the bar where occasional visitors were put, she went back to the
kitchen, raked over the embers of the fire, and put out a flare that was
burning low in its tin of rancid fat and belching forth streams of heavy
black smoke.

She opened the door of the Schoolmaster's room. The bunk against the
wall on which he slept was empty, the window open. She entered, closed
the door and sat down by the open window.

The moonlight was waning. The silver light in which the forest had been
bathed an hour before, was dimmer, the shadows the house and sheds cast
black against it. Where the light struck dead trees they stood out
wraith-like from the dark wave of the forest.

Listening intently, she heard the distant cracking of whips, the long
lowing, belched and terrified cries of cattle.




CHAPTER XXXII


When McNab awakened in the morning, he realised that his sleep had been
too heavy for him to know what had happened during the night, and that
much might have occurred while he was snoring.

Farrel found him snapping and biting like a trapped dingo. His voice
rasped; his inquisitive, suspicious eyes were everywhere. But the
Schoolmaster had none of the air of a victorious gamester, and Deirdre's
amiability was of a pattern with what he had imagined it the night
before. He had heard Davey and Conal ride out at dawn with a cracking of
whips and yelping of dogs to wake the saints. That seemed to negative
the suggestion that they had been out all night. They were going to
muster a couple of hundred of Maitland's cattle in some paddocks near
Red Creek, he remembered the Schoolmaster had said.

Yet by the cold light of early morning, he had an unaccountable
sensation of having been tricked. What with the girl's smiles and
Steve's grog he had not been as wide awake as he had intended to be, he
knew. Farrel's readiness to consider the school proposition irritated
him. It had been a pretext; his only anxiety was not to discuss it any
more. He was all fret and fume to get back to the Wirree. Nothing would
stay him.

When he was up in his high-seated spring-cart, there was none of the
complaisant geniality of the night before about him. He gathered up his
reins with a sour smile at the little group assembled on Steve's
verandah and drove out of sight at a jolting jog-trot.

"The boys got the mob?" Steve asked anxiously.

The Schoolmaster took off his hat with a sigh.

"Had the time of their lives!" he exclaimed. "It was a big mob--rolling
fat."

Deirdre's eyes were still on the track down which McNab had gone to the
Wirree.

"I won't say good-bye, Deirdre," he had said, as his eyes rested on her
for a moment. "I'll be seein' you again soon."

There had been something in the nature of a promise--or a threat--in his
eyes.

"There was no time to fix brands," the Schoolmaster was telling Steve.
"Conal's running these with a couple of score of Maitland's store
beasts. Drafted out about fifty calves, clear skins and a couple of
dozen cows, put them into the Narrow Valley run--wants to do some
branding when he gets back. I thought he ought to let them go with the
half-dozen scrubbers turned back to the bush, but he wouldn't have it;
says he can take them along, branded, with Maitland's next bunch."

"It's a bit risky leavin' them there."

Steve's glance wandered in the direction of the valley lying to the
westward between the last line of hills that shut the shanty in from the
long roll of inland plains.

"It's a bit risky," he repeated. "But Conal knows his business. It'll be
all right, I suppose. There's nobody goes Narrow Valley way but
Cameron's men, and they're not likely to be going this time of the
year--seeing the rains are due. Conal had a look at the fences when he
was up a couple of days ago, didn't he? Though fences aren't much good.
Seen a wild cow fly like a bird when she wants to. Good thing Conal got
away before the rains, Dan. If the rivers were down he'd never've got
through."

"Yes," said the Schoolmaster. "It was a case of now or never."

"And, after all," he added gravely, putting his arm out and drawing her
to him, "it was Deirdre saved the situation. But I wouldn't have you do
what you did again, dear, not for all the cattle in the world, nor all
the money in it."

She clung to him.

"And I wouldn't do it," she sobbed, breathlessly.




CHAPTER XXXIII


It was nearly two months before Conal and Davey were back in the Wirree
again.

They rode into the township one evening when the sun was sinking behind
the purple range of the hills and making a rosy mist of the dust a mob
of northern cattle raised.

Dust-grimed and silent, their whips curled on their arms, their dogs
lean and limping at heel, they passed McNab's. They might have been any
of a dozen cattle-men who were about the sale-yards that day; but McNab
recognised them.

It was those cattle of Maitland's that stood between him and his
suspicions of the game Conal and the Schoolmaster were on. He thought he
knew the part they played in it, but itched for a straw of proof. He
hurried to the doorway and stood in it, chewing his underlip, as he
watched the road-weary, weedy beasts and their drovers trail out of the
town.

Conal saw him.

"Pullin' 'em up and comin' back for a drink in a minute, McNab," he
yelled.

He lost no chances of letting Thad think there was nothing to hide in
his movements. He returned to the Black Bull a few moments later, and
Davey went on to Hegarty's.

Teddy, Steve's black boy, and the dogs, watched the cattle on the edge
of the road.

Conal and Davey spent few words on each other. They went their separate
ways by mutual consent, avoiding the occasions that mean association or
talking.

On the road during the first days, when the cattle were fresh, they had
swung their stock-whips, keeping the mob going, like one man. There had
been headlong gallops after breakaways, the thrashing-in of stragglers,
the crowding of beasts up steep, slippery hillsides with curses and
yelping dogs, the watchfulness that driving a mob of wild cattle
short-handed meant; nerves and muscles were stretched to the job in
hand.

When a halt was made the first night, the mob was ringed with brushwood
fires. The wildest of the scrub-bred warrigals, broken by the long day's
steady trotting, hustled up quietly against Maitland's well-fattened
store beasts. Conal and the black boy took the first watch, Davey and
Conal the second, and Davey and the black the third.

Ordinarily the fires flaring against the darkness were enough to keep
the cattle in a bunch during the night. Sometimes when a fire died down
and there was a longer gap in the links between the fires, a restless
heifer or steer made a dash for it, and the watcher had to be quick with
a burning bough, brandish and whack it about the head of the runaway
before the beast with a moaning bellow and roar turned back to the mob
again.

It was on the second night out when Conal was sleeping and Davey and
Teddy watching, that the black, stupid with sleep, let his fires go
down, and a red bull and half a dozen cows broke through the ring. It
looked like a stampede. Davey dashed after the bull. Conal's dog, Sally,
alert at the first rush of the cattle's movement, leapt after them. Her
long, yellow shape flashed like a streak of lightning in the wan light
over the plains. She raced level with the leader's sleek shoulder and
laid her teeth in his hide, wheeled him, snapping at his nose and
dragging him by it, until he turned in toward the mob again. Davey
lashed the cows after the leader. Sally flew round them, a yellow fury,
yelping and snapping. Conal, half-asleep, flung on to his horse, and
laid about him with his whip, cursing. He and the black boy had all
their work cut out to keep the mob steady.

It was a near thing, and Conal used his tongue pretty freely when he
talked of it. He had had very little to say to Davey, ordinarily. The
memory of that evening in the kitchen at Steve's rankled. It bred a
sense of resentment and secret antagonism which he took less pains to
hide, from that night. He used his lungs to curse Teddy and the red
steer, but did not talk to Davey unless he had something to say about
the cattle or the road. From dawn till sunset they rode silently within
a dozen yards of each other.

When they came within easy distance of Rane and the lake settlements
they kept the mob moving all night. The Snowy was swollen with recent
rains when they came to it; but Conal had set his mind on crossing
without delay.

He rushed the mob down the incline to the river, and drove it into the
swirling stream. Whip thongs swung together ripped and racked in the
clear air. The struggling, terrified beasts were crowded, with no more
than their heads above water, against the strong currents of the stream
until, with rattling and clashing horns, they clambered up the bank on
the further side.

The last days on the road were taken more easily. The mob went slowly
eastward, grazing as it moved, and was in prime condition when Conal
handed it over to Maitland in Cooburra, on the New South Wales side.
Maitland was a big man in the district, head of the well-known firm of
stock dealers; no difficulties were made about the turn-over. When Conal
had had some talk with him, and Davey and he had loafed about the town
for a day or two, they went out again with half a hundred poor beasts
from a drought-stricken Western run.

On the road behind the mob, despite their secret resentment, Long Conal
and Davey Cameron had come to the dumb understanding of road mates. It
did nothing to break the silence between them. Davey yielded Conal an
unconscious homage. He did it with grudging humility; but there was no
breaking the barrier of Conal's reserve. Notwithstanding his blithe
recklessness, his daring and bragging enthusiasm, there was a stern
quality, an unplumbed depth in Conal. He endured Davey's company, but
there was that in his mind against him which one man does not easily
forgive another. As they drew nearer Wirreeford, and the thoughts of
each took the same track, the latent animosity vibrated between them
again.

Conal lost no time in getting out of the township and taking the road to
the hills, Davey, conscious that it was Conal, and not he, who would
stand well in the eyes of Deirdre and the Schoolmaster when the story of
the road was told, lingered at Hegarty's.

A brooding bitterness possessed him. He knew that Conal had wanted him
until this deal was fixed up, not only because he was short of a man
when Pat and Tim Kearney cleared out, but because he was afraid how he,
Davey, might use the knowledge he had told the Schoolmaster he possessed
about some other of Conal's cattle dealings. As for himself, Davey knew
that not only had his independence demanded a job, but something of the
spirit of adventure, a recklessness of consequences, had appealed to him
in the moonlighting of a couple of hundred scrub cattle.

He wondered what he would do when the Schoolmaster and Conal and Deirdre
left the hills. He knew that a share of the money the cattle had brought
would be his. He thought that he would go away from the South when he
got it, and strike out in some new line of life for himself.




CHAPTER XXXIV


Davey was on his way to Steve's when he saw that the wooden church with
a zinc roof, which had just been built in Wirreeford, was lighted, and
that people were going into it.

It was early evening, the sky clear above the sharp outlines of the
building, a few stars quivering in the limpid twilight.

Davey pulled up his horse to stare at the church. The place had been
building a long while. This was the first time he had seen it up and
finished.

In the paddock beside it was his father's carry-all, and the grey horse
beside it was Bessie, old Lass's daughter. A vague heart pain caught his
breath. The wind brought the strain of a plaintive hymn. They must be
inside, his mother and father, he told himself. He got off his horse and
led her into the deep shadow the paling fence threw. A longing to see
them seized him. He stood there trying to hear their voices.

After a moment he thought he could hear his mother's voice, frail and
sweet, in the singing. He remembered how she had sung to him once, how
she had sung over her spinning wheel and the quaint little song it was.
The tune of it went flying through his brain with the tap-tap of the
spinning wheel. How gay and dear her voice had been. He remembered how
he used to love as a child to sit clutching at her dress when she sang
like that. And the old man! In that moment of loneliness he forgot the
hard speaking and bitterness there had been between him and his father.
A wave of tenderness overwhelmed him. Pride and a longing for their love
struggled in him with a physical hurt beyond endurance.

He determined to stand there and wait to see them come out of church.

Friday night services after the cattle sales were an institution as new
as the church. They had been organised so that christenings, marriages,
and some soul-saving into the bargain, might be done while the hill folk
were down for the sales. McNab had done his best to move the parson who
had accepted the Wirree as his cure of souls, but the young man stuck
like a limpet, and there was no telling, the gossips said, how moral and
church-going he might not make Wirreeford before he was done with it.

Davey waited and watched.

When the people came filing out of the doorway, he edged along the fence
so that he could see their faces as they passed under the flare of an
oil-can over the door.

There were not many of them, two or three women and children, and an old
man or two. They gathered and were talking about the gateway when Mary
Cameron came out.

Davey saw her face under the light for a moment. There was a shine of
tears on her cheeks. Her figure, in the grey dress he knew so well,
seemed thinner than it used to be. Her little straw bonnet was pressed
down close on her head, her shawl drawn over her shoulders. She hurried
from the church door without speaking to anyone. He saw her hand flutter
out to the post by the door as she felt for the step.

"She's been crying and saying her prayers for me," he told himself with
pain and self-reproach.

He waited to see Donald Cameron come from the church and join her.

A girl--a fair-haired girl--detached herself from the little gathering
about the gate and went towards her.

"Oh, there you are, Mrs. Cameron, dear," she said. "I was waiting to
help you put Bess in!"

Davey knew her voice. It was Jessie Ross. His heart gave a throb of
gratitude.

The young parson came out and slammed the church door behind him.

Davey's glance flew to the paddock. He could see his mother's grey-clad
figure moving about among the vehicles and the horses.

"The old man's not with her. She's harnessing up herself," he thought.
"Where is he, I wonder? She wouldn't have come down alone."

He saw the heavy buggy, his mother sitting erect in it, go out along the
road. He followed at a little distance.

The buggy halted before the Black Bull.

A dozen horses, dogs lying limp and silent at their heels, were tethered
to the posts before it. The bar was open and noisy with men drinking.
They were gathered about its narrow benches like flies. From the gaping
doors a garish light fell. But it was out of range of the light that
Mary Cameron had drawn up her horse. She sat very still. The outlines of
the vehicle were ruled black against the starlight which rested wanly on
her figure and on the sturdy, grey horse.

"What on earth is she waiting for?" Davey asked himself.

He was going to her when the side-door of the Black Bull--the door of
McNab's parlour, as he knew--opened. Donald Cameron stood in it for a
moment. Davey saw McNab behind him, his crooked figure and twisted face
with the withered fringe of hair about it.

Cameron staggered across the stretch of gravel to the buggy in which his
wife sat waiting. He climbed into it.

"Will you not let me drive, Donald?"

The clear sweetness of his mother's voice came to the boy's ears.

"No," Donald Cameron said unsteadily. "There's no woman living will
drive me while I can lay hands on the reins."

The four-wheeler moved away over the long winding road to the hills.

Davey was stupefied.

"So McNab's got him," he muttered, glancing at the ramshackle shanty.
The sign-board of the Black Bull, with red eyes on its dingy white
ground, was just visible. The glare from the bar lighted it.

"That's why she goes to church alone. The old man's drinking," he
thought.

He turned to look after the buggy. It was bumping and jolting over the
ruts and barking the roadside. Davey held his breath; he saw the mare
buck and then take the log culvert over the creek two or three hundred
yards from McNab's.

"He's not fit to drive," he told himself, and swinging into his saddle,
set off down the road. "He'll turn the wheel on a log, or drive off the
road. She knows. That's why she wanted to drive."

He followed at a little distance all the way through the hills.
Sometimes he heard his mother's voice, patient and yet edged with a
weariness and despair, exclaiming: "Mind there's a bad rut to the left!"
or "You're driving too near the edge of the road, Donald!"

But steadily, without reference to either of them, the little horse kept
to the track. Davey followed them all the way home, to the very gates of
the house in which he was born. Then he turned back into the shade of
the trees again. Once his mother had looked round and seen the watchful
horseman. She had not been near enough to see his face. He rode in the
shadows. But he had seen her face and it was a revelation to him.

A woman must have a good deal of courage to drive beside a drunken man
in the hills at night, he knew. The look on her face hurt him. There
were death gaps at a dozen places on the road; and Donald Cameron was as
stubborn as a mule. Neither the mare, nor his wife, could have saved him
if he had taken it into his head to drive in any given direction. Davey
wondered how often his mother had driven like this before. He vowed that
she would never do it again--if he could help it.




CHAPTER XXXV


After the sales on the following Friday, when the dust of the yards was
heavy in the air, and the stock horses stood in irregular, drooping
lines outside the Black Bull and Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty's, Davey made his
way to where on an open space of land the church had been built.
Wirreeford had out its lights--garish oil flares and rush candles--and
the little fires lighted before the doors of the houses to keep off sand
flies and mosquitoes, smouldered in the dusk, sending up wreaths of blue
smoke.

He had made up his mind as to what he was going to do. During the week
Conal had been mustering and branding the cows and calves drafted from
the scrub mob. Davey had worked with him, and many of the calves he had
scarred with Maitland's double M. were the progeny of his father's
cattle. Half a dozen cows bore the D.C. brand under their thick hair.
Conal had wanted to pay him off. He had told Davey that there was no
need for him to burn his fingers with this business, and that he could
run the mob to the border, or to Melbourne, across the swamp, if the
south-eastern rivers were down; but he was short-handed, Davey knew; a
sense of obligation urged him to stick to Conal until the whole of the
mob they had moonlighted together was disposed of.

Conal had insisted on getting the cows and calves into a half-timbered
paddock below Steve's, the day before, and had run a hundred of
Maitland's fattened beasts with them. He meant to make a start and have
the mob on the roads early next morning.

There was a race-meeting in the long paddock behind McNab's that Friday.

Conal and he had come into the Wirree to show themselves before starting
off on their overland journey. Almost every man in the countryside was
there.

Davey wondered why the Schoolmaster had not come down to the township
with Conal and himself. He had been a different man since their return,
very silent, scarcely stirring from his chair in the back room, while
Deirdre hovered, never very far from him, anxious and protective as a
mother-bird.

She had not told him what had happened while Conal and he were away--how
the Schoolmaster had said to her one day, suddenly:

"It's very dark, Deirdre. Is there going to be a storm?"

The sunshine was blank and golden out of doors.

"No," she had said, laughing. "There's not a sign of one."

"Where are you?" he asked, his voice strange and strained.

"Why, I'm here just beside you," she replied.

He put out his hands.

"I can't see you," he said. "It's the dark, Deirdre! My God ... it's the
dark."

For a long time he had sat staring while she knelt beside him, crying,
murmuring eagerly and tenderly, trying to soothe and to comfort him. But
from that time the dimming and obliterating of the whole world had begun
for him.

The heavy darkness had passed. It was not all night yet, but a misty
twilight. He had forbidden her to speak of it, so that Davey did not
know. Conal and Steve had guessed, but Davey's mind, busy with its own
problems, was slower to realise what was going on about him. It had
roused every loyal and fighting instinct in him to see his mother with
that look of suffering on her face; his father in the way of becoming
McNab's prey--losing all that he had gained through years of toil and
harsh integrity by falling into the pigs' trough McNab had set for him.

It was that stern righteousness of his, his sober, stolid virtue, which
had given Cameron the place in the respect and grudging homage of the
countryside that his wealth and property alone would not have won for
him; they had cloaked even his meanness with a sombre dignity and
brought him the half-jesting title of the Laird of Ayrmuir.

Davey led his horse into the paddock beside the church where the
vehicles which had brought the hill folk to the township were standing.
The horses out of the shafts, their heavy harness still on their backs,
were feeding, tethered to the fence, or to the wheels of the carts and
buggies.

He stood beside the high, old-fashioned buggy that had brought Mary and
Donald Cameron to Wirreeford. He rubbed his hand along Bessie's long
coffin-box of a nose, and told her on a drifting stream of thought that
he had decided to go home, to ask his father to forgive him, and that he
meant to try to get on with him again. Her attitude of attention and
affection comforted him.

The people began to come from the church. They stood in groups by the
doorway talking to each other. One or two men came into the paddock to
harness-up for the home journey. Davey put the mare into her shafts. He
was fastening the traces when Mary Cameron came round the back of the
buggy. A catch of her breath told that she had seen him.

"Davey!" she cried.

He saw her face, the light of her eyes.

"Mother!" he sobbed.

His arms went round her, and his face with the rough beard--such a man's
face it had become since it last brushed her's--was crushed against her
cheek.

"I'm coming home," he said, his voice breaking. "Not now, not to-night,
but in a little while. I'll ask the old man to forgive me and see if we
can't get along better."

"Davey! Davey!" she cried softly, looking into his face, a new joy in
her own. "Oh, but they are sad days, these! Have you heard what they are
saying of your father? They tell me that you have been over the ranges."

"Yes," Davey said. She scarcely recognised his voice. "It's because of
father--because of what they're saying--I'm coming home. I won't have
them say it ... after all he's done ... do you think I'm going to let
him lose it, if I can help it."

There was a passionate vibration in his voice.

"How did it happen? I saw you on Friday and followed you home."

"Oh, my boy!" Her hand trembled on his shoulders. "It was you then?
What's come to your father I don't know at all. He's not the same man he
used to be. It's that man at the Black Bull. He's got hold of him--I
don't know how ... but he's been drinking there often now, and he never
used to be a drinking man--your father. I think it was his
disappointment with you at first ... I'm not blaming you, Davey. It
wasn't to be expected you'd do anything but what you did. I'm not
blaming you. But there were the long evenings by ourselves, after you'd
gone. He sat eating his heart out about it before the fire, and I
couldn't say a word. He was thinking of you all the time--but his pride
wouldn't let him speak. He was seeing the ruin of his hopes for you. He
meant you to be a great man in the district. Then McNab began talking to
him. Your father thinks McNab's doing him a good turn in some way, but I
feel it's nothing but evil will come to us from him. The sight of the
man makes me shiver and I wonder what harm it is he is planning for us."

Her voice went to Davey's heart.

"I know, mother," he said. "But it'll be all right soon. The old man'll
pull up when I come home. I'll tell him I mean to be all he wants me to
be. I was a fool before, though I don't think I could go on in the old
way even now. But he'll be reasonable if I go the right way about asking
him. I've a deal more sense than I had. I've sobered down a lot ... can
see things straighter. I won't be having any dealings with McNab
again--and I'll get father to cut him. The pair of us'll be more than
equal to him. But I've got to finish my job with Conal first ... it
wouldn't be playing the game to leave him just now."

"Is it Conal you've been working with, Davey?" her eyes went up to his
anxiously.

"Yes," he said.

"Your father's been talking a lot about this work of Conal's," she went
on, a troubled line in her forehead. "He says the Schoolmaster's in it
too. McNab's been talking to him about it, and they mean to interfere in
some way. He's talked a good deal about it when he didn't know he was
talking, driving home in the evenings. But McNab's making a fool of him
for his own purposes, and to do harm to Mr. Farrel, I think. I was
trying to tell your father that, but he wouldn't hear me. Oh, why have
you got yourself mixed up with duffing and crooked ways, Davey?"

"What did he say?" Davey asked.

"I don't remember all of it." She swept her brow with a little weary
gesture. "It was all mumbling and muttering, and I couldn't hear half
what he said--but it was to do with cattle. And to-day McNab came over
to the yards as soon as we arrived and I heard him say: 'I've got word
where there's a mob with brands won't bear lookin' into, to-night. I'll
tell M'Laughlin, and he'll get a couple of men to work with him. If
you'll come round to the parlour we can fix up what's to be done.'"

Davey jerked his horse's bridle, pulling him round to mount.

"I meant to take you home myself to-night, mother," he said. "But I'll
have to find Conal and tell him this. There's no time to lose."

"I'll be all right, Davey," she said tremulously; "I'll go and wait for
your father at McNab's. He's there now. And we're quite safe with Bess
taking us home. She knows every inch of the way."

Davey kissed her hurriedly.

He turned out of the church paddock towards Hegarty's. There was a dance
in full swing, and he thought that Conal might be there. But although a
new fiddler was in his element and most of the young people in the
district jigging, Conal was not. He went back along the road to McNab's.

Outside, in the buggy, Mary Cameron was sitting. She turned and smiled
when he rode up to her. Her face had a shy happiness, but the patience
and humility of her waiting attitude infuriated him.

He swung off his horse and opened the door of McNab's side parlour.

Cameron was sitting at the small, uneven table, a bottle of rum and
glasses before him. McNab on the other side of the table, leaning across
it was talking to him, his voice running glibly. The light of an oil
lamp on the table between them showed his yellow, eager eyes, the
scheming intensity of the brain behind them, the lurking half-smile of
triumph about his writhing, colourless lips. M'Laughlin, leaning lazily
back in his chair, his long legs stretched under the table, sat watching
and listening to him.

McNab sprang to his feet with an oath when he saw Davey in the doorway.

"Mother's waiting for you outside," he said, lifting Donald Cameron by
the elbows and leading him to the door.

He turned on McNab with his back to it.

"I'll be looking after my father's affairs from this out," he said. "And
you remember what I promised you if you interfered with me again ...
you'll get it sure as I live."

He slammed the door.

Donald Cameron, stupid with McNab's heavy spirits, was unprepared for
this masterful young man whose rage was burning to a white heat. He went
with him as quietly as as a child.

Davey helped him into the buggy.

"Keep him away from McNab," he said to his mother, "and I'll be home as
soon as I can."

She smiled, the shy, happy smile of a girl, nodded to him, and they
drove off.

Davey went back into the bar of the Black Bull, with its crowd of
stockmen, drovers, shop-keepers and sale-yard loungers.

"Where's Conal?" he asked. "Does anybody know if he's left the town
yet?"

There was a roar of laughter.

"He was looking for you an hour ago, Davey," a drunken youngster yelled
gaily. "Was in here, 'n McNab gave him a turn about the Schoolmaster's
girl--"

"McNab was tellin' him you'd made-up to marry her. You should have heard
Conal go off," somebody shouted.

"Where is he?" There was a sharpness about Young Davey's question that
nobody liked.

"Who? McNab?"

"No, Conal!"

McNab had come into the bar and was standing watching him, his face
livid.

"Round somewhere lookin' for your blood," the same jovial youngster, who
had first spoken, cried.

"Seen him go up towards the store a while ago, Davey," Salt Watson said
slowly.

No one smelt mischief brewing quicker than he. He had seen McNab's face.
He knew Young Davey's temper and the sort of man he was growing. He knew
Conal, too, and that no love was lost between them. It was an urgent
matter would send Davey looking through the town for Conal that way, he
guessed, and knowing something of the business they had in hand, as an
old roadster always does, imagined the cause of the urgency.

McNab looked as if Davey's anxiety to find Conal had taught him
something too.

Davey flung out of the bar. He straddled his horse again and went flying
off down the road to the store.

Conal was not there. Someone said he had been, and set out for the hills
an hour earlier. Davey made off down the road again, doubling on his
track, past the Black Bull. He thought that he would catch up to Conal
on the road, and that they would be back at Steve's before M'Laughlin
and his men were out of Wirreeford.

The culvert over the creek that he had watched Bess shy at and take in
her own leisurely fashion a week before, was not half a mile from the
outskirts of the township. The creek banks on either side were fringed I
with wattles and light-woods. As the mare rattled across it there was a
whistling crack in the air. Davey pitched on her neck. Terrified, she
leapt forward. He clung to her, swaying for a while, yet never losing
his grip.

He knew that someone had shot him from the trees by the culvert. There
was a sharp pain in his breast; blood welled from it.




CHAPTER XXXVI


The little red horse's pace was as swift as a swallow's. Sure-footed,
she flashed on over the long winding roads, up the steep hillsides and
down them, slipping and sliding on the loose shingles, but keeping her
knees in the cunning way that only the mountain horses know. Davey heard
the beat of her hoofs until the sound became mechanical. Though she was
moving, she seemed to get no further--to throw no distance behind her,
forging ahead through the darkness.

Fear and a suffocating weakness began to dull his brain, he could not
see. The sagging pain in his breast ate up his strength. With a
desperate effort he pulled the handkerchief from his throat and thrust
it inside his shirt against the wound. He dug his heels into Red's side,
urging her on.

A diffused glow of lights loomed before him. As if wakening from a
nightmare in which he had been struggling to get forward and was held
back by mysterious, unknown forces, he realised that they were the
lights of the shanty.

The mare carried him on into the stable yard. The welcome yelp of dogs
greeted his ears. He flung off her, staggered across the yard and burst
open the back door. He was conscious of Farrel and Deirdre springing
towards him, of Steve behind them. Then surging darkness, the swirling
tides of dreamless darkness that had been pressing close to him all the
way, closed over him. For a moment he struggled against them, trying to
speak. A few muttered, incoherent words were all Deirdre and the
Schoolmaster caught.

He pitched forward.

Deirdre ran to him. The Schoolmaster helped her to lift Davey over on
his back. She moistened his lips with the spirit that Steve brought
quickly.

"There's blood on him, father," she cried. There was no tremor in her
voice, only a tense anxiety.

Farrel told her what to do, to cut away Davey's shirt where the blood
oozed on it. Steve went for water and rags as she did so. The flickering
light of the candle the Schoolmaster held, showed the broken and
blackened flesh.

"He's been shot ... it's a slug made that mark," Steve gasped when he
saw it.

When he had put a basin of cold water beside her, she laid soaked rags
on the wound. The shock brought Davey a moment of consciousness. He
moaned, stirring with pain. His eyes opened. He saw Deirdre's face above
his and the Schoolmaster bending over him.

He stared at them unseeingly. Then the mists cleared from his brain.
"I'm all right," he muttered, "all right...."

He lay quite still.

"Have you got the calves out of the paddock?" he asked a moment later,
his voice stronger. "M'Laughlin and a couple of men'll be here
presently. McNab's got wind of their being in the paddock, here. Get
them out to the valley quick, or let them go."

"Where's Conal?" Steve asked eagerly; "he ought to be in by now."

There was a crooked furrow of pain on Davey's face.

"I looked for him before I came out," he said. "Couldn't find
him--thought he must have gone on ahead. I got this," his hand went to
his breast, "crossing the culvert over the creek. They said at McNab's,
Conal had been swearing--to do for me--but I didn't believe it...."

His body sagged and his head went back; but Deirdre was behind him; she
rested his head on her knees.

Her eyes flew to the Schoolmaster.

"It was Conal," she breathed. "He said he would do it."

Farrel's face whitened. He put no man before Long Conal.

Deirdre put a pack of wet rags over the wound again, and bound it on
with a piece of unbleached linen.

Her eyes went anxiously to Steve.

"He's not going to die, is he?" she asked.

"No," Steve muttered, cheerfully. His eyes travelled the length of the
boy's sturdy frame. "It's not much more than a surface wound, though
it's cut up the flesh a good deal. He'd look different if he was goin'
to kick the bucket."

"If we could lift him into the other room it would be better," she
suggested. "The men from the Wirree may be coming."

"Yes," the Schoolmaster said.

As they tried to move him, Davey regained consciousness.

"Have you got those beasts out?" he asked querulously. "There's no time
to lose. I'm all right."

Deirdre on one side, the Schoolmaster on the other, they led him to the
room in which Farrel slept. He sank wearily on the bunk against the
wall.

The Schoolmaster went back to the kitchen for a moment.

Deirdre bent over the bunk, gazing at Davey's still face anxiously,
intently. It was no time for weeping or exclamation. She realised the
danger that threatened. If M'Laughlin and the men from the Wirree came
and found the cattle in the paddock below Steve's, not only Davey, but
also the Schoolmaster would have to pay the penalty.

She went back to the kitchen.

"He's sleeping," she said.

The Schoolmaster and Steve were standing by the door arguing in an
undertone together.

The Schoolmaster turned to go out.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Let those animals out," he said briefly. "It's no good, Teddy won't go
with them alone. He's as afraid of the dark as they are. And if
M'Laughlin's coming we've got to get them out of the way."

"He's going to try and take them himself to the valley; and it's
madness--he can't see," cried Steve.

"Conal was a fool to bring them near the place. I told him this morning,
but he'll take his own way and nobody else's," the Schoolmaster replied.
"If he were here now--"

"I'm going to take them, father," Deirdre said. "They're easy enough to
drive at night and Teddy'll work with me. You watch Davey. He'll be
right now, but in case--Besides the place has got to look peaceable and
ordinary if M'Laughlin comes."

"I can't let you do it, Deirdre."

The Schoolmaster's voice was harsh and peremptory.

"I'm going to!"

He recognised his own spirit in her.

"There's no time to lose," she said, "and I know the track to the
Valley. Conal showed it to me--I helped him to bring in the calves
yesterday, and I haven't been on the roads with you both for the last
year without knowing how to manage a handful of old cows."

"I tell you, I'll not have it," the Schoolmaster interrupted
passionately.

"It means as much to me as to any of you," she said, a little breathless
sob in her voice. "You don't know how much. You can't have these beasts
with the new brands running the hills now. Conal ought to be responsible
for them, but that won't help us much if they're found here. Davey's
known to have been working with him--and you were suspected of being
with him even when you weren't!"

The door slammed behind her.

Steve followed her out of doors.

He pulled the chestnut's girths when she had thrown a saddle across his
back.

"You can manage the calves, of course, Deirdre," he said. "Keep 'm quiet
as you can. No shouting, mind. The dogs know night work with cattle's
mostly quiet work--keep 'm back. You'll not be raising a whip yourself.
I'll tell Teddy, the less crackin' the better. These beasts'll go quiet
enough."

He and the Schoolmaster watched her flying out across the faintly
moonlit paddocks. The dogs were soon working round the mob in a far
corner where the fence panels were down. Deirdre drove them through the
opening. The black boy was on the road waiting to keep the beasts' noses
northwards with an adroit flick of his whip. It was with an occasional
lowing and rattling of horns, the brush and rattle of hoofs on the dry
timber that they passed out into the shadows of the road.

The Schoolmaster had no fear that Deirdre could not manage this handful
of yearlings and old cows. She had chased calves from paddock to paddock
when she was big enough to straddle a pot-bellied pony, and had cracked
a light whip which Conal had made for her, with a fall a couple of
inches shorter than his own, round many a restless herd when Conal and
he were droving and she was on the roads with them. It was the
bitterness of not being able to drive himself that plagued Farrel: the
consciousness of having to stand by and let her do what there was danger
in doing, incensed him. Steve watched the road for sound or sign of men
and horses from Wirreeford. Then he chased his own two milkers up from
the cow paddock and ran them backwards and forwards along the road where
the mob had passed, to obliterate its tracks.

A weight was off the Schoolmaster's mind when Steve said that Deirdre
and the black were out of sight. He knew that by taking the cattle along
the narrow tracks on the ledges of the hills, she would save them.
Narrow Valley scrubs would screen them from curious eyes. If M'Laughlin
came, the road would tell no tales. Steve's cows had made it look as if
a mob had passed in the opposite direction beyond the shanty, and he and
the Schoolmaster had a story to fit the tracks. They did not think that
anybody but themselves knew the way under the trees on the Valley
hillsides. Only if M'Laughlin brought a tracker would he be able to
follow Deirdre.

Farrel wondered how word had reached McNab, and what foolhardiness had
led Conal to bring these branded calves to the paddock below Steve's.
For a moment the idea that Conal, baited and maddened with drink, might
have given some hint at McNab's of the beasts being in Steve's paddock,
occurred to him. And then there was Davey. For a while his mind brooded
over what had happened to him.

"It was only mad with drink, Conal could have shot at a man in the
dark," he told himself. "The open fight is his way." Conal and he had
been friends a good many years, and there was something in his estimate
of the man which defied the idea that he had shot Davey. And yet it
looked as if he had. Why was he not in? He had left Wirreeford an hour
before Davey. Conal was on the road before Davey. And he had been
drinking at McNab's. He had been taunted with Deirdre's name.

"It was only mad with drink he could have done it," the Schoolmaster
told himself again. And even then a fierce contempt and condemnation
surged within him. The memory of Deirdre's fired young womanhood; of the
look in her face, of the glow in her eyes, told him what this hurt to
Davey meant to her.

Steve watched in the room beside Davey.

His shrunken, crippled limbs ached. His head sank on his breast. He
drooped and slept forgetfully. The Schoolmaster strode the length of the
kitchen. The fire smouldered low. He threw some wood on it. The
crackling flames flashed and played freakishly across the room. He
wondered if Conal would come--where he was. The hours passed. There was
no sound or sign of late riders from the Wirree. He opened the door of
the hut. The night was very still. Only a mopoke called plaintively in
the distance.

There was a stir in the room in which Davey was sleeping. Farrel heard
Steve's voice in startled and sleepy protest. The door opened, Davey
stood on the threshold his eyes with a delirious brightness in them.

"What have you done about those calves?" he asked, his voice quick and
clear.

"We are going to let 'em go," Steve gasped. "You go back and lie down
now, Davey."

"You can't do that with the new brands on them," Davey brushed him
aside, irritably. "I'm all right now. I can take them to the Valley.
It's a bit of luck M'Laughlin hasn't turned up yet. P'raps I upset his
calculations--his and McNab's. He's not so fond of gettin' a move on,
Johnny Mac. Might've guessed I'd got a notion he was going to be busy
when I went round asking for Conal. Thought we'd give him the slip
anyway and he'd save himself the trouble of coming!" He laughed a little
unsteadily. "Think I'll get the calves along to the Valley, all the
same."

The Schoolmaster took his arm.

"Go and lie down, Davey," he said. "If you go wandering about like this,
you'll bring on the bleeding again. Besides, Deirdre--"

"Where is she?" His eyes flew searching the room for her.

"She"--it seemed difficult to say--"She has gone down to the Valley, so
it'll be all right," he said.

Davey turned towards the door.

"Don't be a fool, Davey!" The Schoolmaster intercepted him.

Davey pushed him aside.

He strode into the stable yard as though nothing had happened to disable
him. A moment later the Schoolmaster heard the rattle of hoofs on the
road.

Every fibre of him shivered at the boy's contempt, the blazing amazement
of his eyes. He sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands.




CHAPTER XXXVII


Deirdre and the black boy drove their straggling herd into the stockyard
in the narrow bush clearing, walled by trees, an hour or two before
dawn.

The stock-yards which Conal had put up at the end of Narrow Valley were
invisible to any but those who knew the winding track that led over the
brow of the hill and through the heavy timber on the spur, to the old
hut at the foot of it. Teddy was pulling the rails of the outer-yard
into place and Deirdre was going towards the hut. Socks at her heels,
his bridle over her arm, when a horseman rode out of the opening into
the valley, by which they had come.

She recognised the red horse, but did not know that it was Davey riding
till he was almost level, and dropped to his feet. He swayed against the
horse's side, clutching his reins.

"It's a shame ... no one to bring the brutes but you," he said weakly.
"I came--soon as I knew."

Deirdre put her arm out to him. They walked slowly towards the hut.
Davey became weaker. She drew the horses by their reins behind them,
keeping her eyes on him. The ground rocked under his feet.

"We're just there--another minute and it'll be all right," she said, and
called Teddy.

He had seen Davey Cameron's red horse coming into the clearing, and ran
up to her, chattering with fright at the sight of Davey's limp figure.

"Put the horses up in the shed--leave the saddles on," she said quickly.
"You go back, tell boss--cows all right--Davey very sick man, here."

Although an hour earlier nothing would have induced the boy to brave the
darkness alone, it was not many moments before he was up on his weedy,
half-wild nag and streaking away towards the cover of the trees and the
threadlike track which wound uphill along the spur.

Deirdre opened the door of the hut. Davey took a step or two into it and
fell forward. She set the brushwood on the hearth alight, and threw some
broken branches over it to make a blaze. There was no stir in Davey when
she knelt beside him, and a pool of blood lay on the floor where he had
fallen.

She ran out of doors for water. In the semi-darkness of the hut it was
difficult to find anything to put water in, but there was a pannikin
near the water barrel and she filled that and tore pieces of calico from
her petticoat to bathe his wound.

Groping along the shelves near the fireplace she found the end of a
thick rush and tallow candle. She did not light it at first because the
fire had sprung up and was lighting the room, showing its meagre
equipment, the branding irons and a saddle flung down in a corner, a
bunk against the wall with a couple of sheepskins over it, a table with
two or three pannikins and a black bottle on it. There was a drain of
some spirit in the bottle. She poured it carefully into a pannikin and
held it to Davey's lips.

His immobility frightened her. She lit the candle and held it close to
his face. Under the leaping yellow flames it had the mask-like stillness
and pallor of death.

"Davey! Davey!" she screamed with terror, creeping up beside his heavy,
still body.

"Oh, you mustn't die, Davey--you mustn't!" Even as she sobbed she
thought he was dead.

She put the spirit on his lips again.

"Oh, I've done all that I can--all that I know to do. Won't you look at
me, Davey? My heart's breaking. You've not gone, Davey? You wouldn't
leave me. It's me, Deirdre, your sweetheart, that's with you! Won't you
look at me?... Won't you open your eyes? I can't bear it--if you don't
speak to me."

"Davey!" She caught him by the shoulder, shaking him roughly. "I won't
let you go! I won't let you die!" she cried.

He fell back from her hands.

She threw herself across him sobbing brokenly. Pressing her face close
to his, she leant over him, murmuring and trying to revive him with a
breathless agony of grief and tenderness.

"Oh, come back to me! Oh, you will not die. You will not die and leave
me," she moaned. "Deirdre, that loves you. Your sweetheart, Davey!"

The cry died away.

In her frenzy she had not heard the door open. Spent with anguish she
laid her head against Davey's still one. She felt rather than saw that
someone was there in the hut behind her. She turned. Conal was standing
in the doorway.

She stared at him. He might have been an aparition, so strange he
looked, there in the doorway, with the glimmering night behind him.
There was something stricken, aghast, about him. He gazed at her as if
the tragic woe of her face were a revelation to him.

"He's dead--and it's you that have killed him, Conal," she said, at
length.

"You--love--him, Deirdre?" Conal asked.

So slow and dreary their voices were that they seemed to be talking in
their sleep.

"Yes," she said, "and it's my heart that's dead with him."

"I didn't know you felt like that--about him, Deirdre," Conal said, a
humble, awkward air about him.

That it was Davey lay there dead did not seem to trouble him. It was of
Deirdre he was thinking in a mazed, dazed way, and the thing she had
said to him.

"You've done what no woman could forgive you, Conal." A vibrating
passion had come to her voice. "I never want to see you again as long as
I live."

Conal stared at her a moment; then he swung heavily out of the hut into
the yard. He had the gait of a drunken man. She heard him stumble over
something in the yard, strike his head against a post. Then the sound of
his horse's hoof-beats in the clearing died away.

Deirdre looked down at the still figure beside her. In spite of what she
had said she could not believe that Davey was dead--that all that young,
strong body would not move again, that Davey's eyes would not open and
look at her with the eager, questioning glance she had known. Something
of the horror of his stillness had passed; she moistened his lips with
the spirit. Putting her arms round him she gathered him up against her,
put his head on her bosom and leaned over him, crooning softly, as
though he were asleep. She beguiled herself by saying that he was only
asleep and would waken presently.

"What a long time it is," she murmured. "Do you remember, Davey dear,
the night before father and I went away, and I ran over the paddock to
the corner of the road to see you? I was angry you had gone away without
wanting to see me, yourself.... You kissed me and I kissed you, and I
promised to come back and be your sweetheart and we'd be married some
day.... And the birds laughed. And the red-runners were out by the road.
There was a beautiful sunset, and it got dark soon. You said it was me
you loved and not Jessie. Then I went away ... and it has never been the
same since. But it will be ... when you are well and I can tell you how
much I want you to love me again--"

She laughed softly.

"Do you remember how we used to go home in the cart from school
together, and how we used to trot Lass up the hillsides to make her poor
old sides go like bellows, and you showed me how to blow birds' eggs,
and Jess said I wasn't a little lady to blow birds' eggs."

Her voice ran on with a brooklike tenderness.

"If you'd come back, we could have all those times again, Davey," she
whispered, looking down into his face beneath hers.

Just when there was the faintest shimmer of dawn in the dim windows, a
fluttering breath caught her face. She put the spirit to his lips again.
So, chafing his hands and calling him, with tearful and eager little
cries, she led him as a mother leads a child just learning to walk, from
the valley of the shadows.

Davey opened his eyes. They dwelt on her with a deep, serene gaze. She
smiled and went on crooning to him, half singing, half sighing that
beguiling little melody of tenderness and entreaty. Warmth came back to
him. His breath fell regularly and sweetly. Deirdre took the sheepskins
out of the bunk and put them under him on the floor.

He slept. A faint smile on his mouth, his hand sought hers, the fingers
curled round it. She sat watching him, a mist of awe and joy and
thankfulness gathering in her eyes, because it seemed to her that a
miracle had been accomplished that night in Narrow Valley hut.




CHAPTER XXXVIII


When the broad glare of the morning sun broke through the dingy windows
of the hut, Deirdre started from the cramped position in which she had
fallen, her head leaning wearily against a box.

She was aghast to find that she had been asleep. As she woke with a
startled exclamation, a hand went out to her. Her eyes met Davey's.

It was as if that encounter in the valley of shadows had brushed all
misunderstandings from the love that was like the sun between them.
Deirdre had wrestled with death for possession of him. Her eyes still
bore the shadow of the conflict. Davey was wan and vanquished. He knew
that she had wrested his spirit from the darkness on which it had been
drifting, and the knowledge made a serene joyousness in him.

Speech deserted them; they had no voices to talk with. Just this gazing
of eyes on eyes told all that there was to tell.

Later on she went from his side and began to move about the hut,
gathering the brushwood into the hearth, raking over the ashes and
making the fire again. His eyes followed her.

The hut was shabby and disorderly by daylight. Conal had used it when he
was mustering, and there was a heap of rusty irons in the corner, a few
hoarded tins and half-empty jars of grease on the shelves, some old
clothes, worn-out boots and green-hide thongs behind the door. The bunk,
with its sheepskins, and a table made of a rough hewn plank on three
poles set in the floor, were the only furniture. Deirdre found a bundle
of rags on the shelf near the hearth, and searched for the bottle of
liniment which she knew was kept for use if any of the men got a broken
hand or a kick from a beast in the stock-yards.

Davey knew where Conal had stowed these things while they were working
there together. He tried to help Deirdre to find them. She was at his
side in an instant.

"You mustn't move," she said, a compelling tenderness in her voice.

He fell back.

The touch of her hands was a shock of joy. His face turned up to her,
wan with weakness, radiant at her near presence. His eyes went through
hers.

"Deirdre!"

The cry was a prayer also.

She bent over him; her arms encircled him. From that first kiss of
conscious lovers she withdrew a little tremulously.

"Oh, you must be still," she cried. "If the bleeding begins again you'll
never be strong. You must lie quiet now, and I'll see if I can find some
food. There's sure to be flour and some oatmeal about."

"On the shelf in the corner by the hearth," Davey said. "And there was
tea in a tin there a day or two ago."

She found them and they breakfasted on a weak gruel and tea without
milk. She had helped Davey on to the bunk against the wall and spread
the sheepskins under him when the Schoolmaster and Teddy came into the
yard. Farrel carried a bag of food and a couple of blankets strapped to
his saddle.

Deirdre met him out of doors. The sight of her reassured him. She told
him what had happened during the night--of Davey's long stillness and
insensibility, and of Conal's coming a few hours before the dawn.

The Schoolmaster went into the hut.

"Father says "--Deirdre went straight to Davey--"he doesn't believe it
was Conal fired that shot at you."

Her eyes went out to him troubled and beseeching.

"I can't help thinking it was, myself, though I'd be glad not to. He's
been such a big brotherly sort of man to me always, Conal, and it hurts
to think he could do a thing like that."

She continued after a moment.

"Father says, Conal came in after you'd gone last night. He'd been
drinking, but his voice told him that he didn't do it. As soon as he
knew you'd come after me, the way you were, he rode out after you for
fear you mightn't have been able to reach here. Do--do you think it was
Conal, Davey?"

Davey turned his face to the wall. He could not bear to hear her defence
of Conal--her solicitude and desire to think well of him in spite of
everything. He had no doubt in his own mind. The memory of that
whistling shot from the dark trees, the agony of his long ride through
the hills, came back to him.

"All I know," he said bitterly, "is that I was looking for him before I
left the town to tell him what mother had told me about the raid McNab
and the old man and M'Laughlin were getting up. At the Black Bull they
said they'd been baiting Conal--about me--and he'd gone out looking for
me--promising to do for me. Some one said he'd gone to the store. I went
there and Joe Wilson told me he'd seen Conal riding out an hour earlier.
I thought I'd catch him up on the road. It was from the trees by the
creek the shot came, and Red took fright."

"There's nobody else got a grudge against you, Davey?"

"Not that I know who'd want to settle me that way. McNab, of course,
hasn't got any love for me."

"You went up to the store and straight out along the road past the
Bull?" the Schoolmaster asked.

"Yes, but I'd seen McNab in the bar a couple of minutes before. It
couldn't have been him."

Farrel threw out his hand with a gesture of doubt and disappointment.

"Deirdre says she's heard Conal say that he'd do for you, Davey," he
said, "but she didn't think he meant it. Just his hot-headed way of
talking! McNab must have maddened him, filled him up with drink. I can't
tell you how it goes against the grain to believe he could have done a
thing like this, and yet--it looks like it."

"Was he back when you came away this morning?" Deirdre asked.

"No," the Schoolmaster replied.

"Ask him when he comes in, whether he did, or did not fire at Davey,"
she said. "I'll take his word. Will you, Davey?"

"Yes." Davey's tone was a little uncertain.

The Schoolmaster went to the door again.

Davey called him back with a restless movement.

"What are you going to do about those beasts?" he asked querulously.
"They're better here than at Steve's, but of course if M'Laughlin gets a
tracker it wouldn't take him long to find them. Teddy's got them in the
four-mile paddock this morning, but they ought to be moving."

"Perhaps Conal"--the Schoolmaster began.

"Oh, yes, I forgot, Conal--he'll take them."

Davey fell back.

"Why can't you take them yourself?" he inquired.

The Schoolmaster met his eyes for a moment.

"Lost my nerve," he said, with a little grating laugh, and turned out of
doors.

Deirdre's eyes sparkled with anger.

"Oh," she gasped, breathlessly, "how dare you, Davey? How dare you?"

Davey, morose anger in his eyes, stared at her.

"You're angry because he let me go out last night," she said. "Don't you
know he's almost helpless, that he can just see dimly in the broad
daylight. All the world's going dark to him, and it's breaking his
heart--eating the strength and the soul and the courage out of him, to
stand by and let others do things for him."

Consciousness of what he had done came slowly to Davey.

"Oh, it was mean and cruel and cowardly to hurt him like that!" Deirdre
cried passionately, and ran out into the sunshine after her father.

When she came back into the hut Davey, with a tense white face, was
standing near the door.

"I ought to be flayed alive--but I didn't know, I didn't understand," he
said.

There was no quieting or comforting him.

"Will he ever forgive me? Do you think he will, Deirdre?" His face was
clammy with the sweat of weakness. "It was more than Conal did--that.
Conal wouldn't have done it."

Deirdre went for the Schoolmaster. He came into the hut again. He and
Davey gripped hands. Then the Schoolmaster led him to the bunk again and
stretched him out on it.

"It's all right, my boy! All right!" he said, brokenly. "You lie still
now and let Deirdre look after you."

Davey's vigorous youth rebelled at the days of idleness which followed.
The wound knitted quickly; his weakness vanished as it mended.

Conal had disappeared. No one had seen or heard of him since the night
of the Wirree races. The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had accepted his
disappearance as silent proof of his having fired the shot that had
almost cost Davey his life.

When they went back to the shanty Steve talked incessantly about Conal.
Although no more had been heard of M'Laughlin and the threatened raid
had never been made, he was not easy about that half hundred head of
newly-branded beasts in the Narrow Valley paddock.

At the end of the week Davey took the bit between his teeth.

"I'm going to take that mob to the Melbourne yards," he said. "We can't
run them any longer in the Valley."

"It's too risky, Davey," the Schoolmaster said. "McNab's too quiet to be
harmless, and there's only one man could run the mob with safety."

"And that's Conal?" Davey asked.

"There's not a man in the country like Conal with cattle. He knows every
by-path and siding on the ranges. Then he's hail-fellow-well-met with
the men on the roads. There's not one of them would give him away," the
Schoolmaster said.

"I could run them." The line on Davey's mouth tightened. "And safer than
Conal, I've been thinking. Some of the cows have father's brand on them.
Most of the calves ought to have the D.C. by rights, I suppose. They've
got the cut of our Ayrshires, though Conal's done the double M's pretty
neatly on them.

"What's the old man's will be mine some day, and so they're in a sort of
way my cattle too. I can say, I don't think Ayrmuir had any right--not
much anyway--to them, if we couldn't get them. The old man wouldn't risk
a couple of horses on the off-chance. Rosses and Morrisons lost three
horses when they had a go for 'em, besides there isn't a man on our
place could have yarded them. Conal got them. We were with him. You can
hold his share for this batch when I bring it to you. But I'm going to
drive, saying they are Donald Cameron's cattle. So they are, most of
them. I'll be driving my own cattle as a matter of fact, though it may
be realising on the estate, a forced loan from the old man, you may say.
My name will carry me through and when the deal's over I can make it
right with father. I'm going home."

"Can't think what Conal means, leavin' 'em so long," Steve muttered
irritably.

"We can't have them on our hands any longer!"

Davey's voice was short and irritable too.

"You're right, Davey." The Schoolmaster spoke slowly, thoughtfully.
"What you say makes the getting rid of them sound easy, but I hardly
like the idea of--"

"Taking your share, after the way I've put it?" Davey interrupted. "But
as far as I'm concerned they're Conal's beasts, and your's--and
mine--because we got them. Nobody else could, and they weren't any good
to anybody eating their heads off in the hills. But for all the world
it's as if I had contracted with you to do it on behalf of the estate.
Ayrmuir gets a third of the profits. I'll hand it over to the old
man--and as likely as not he'll be glad enough to see it, for a couple
of dozen breakaways and scrubbers he never expected to make a penny out
of again."

The Schoolmaster's gesture of impatience was one of resignation also.

"It's a specious argument, Davey," he said, "but I wish to heaven you'd
kept clear of the whole business."

That evening Davey called Deirdre and they wandered down the hillside,
watching the sun set on the distant edge of the plains that stretched,
northwards and inland, from the rise beyond Steve's.

"I'm going to-morrow," he said, and told her of the promise he had made
his mother. "I feel it's up to me to carry this job through, but when
it's over I'm coming back--going home. When I come back will you marry
me, Deirdre?"

"Yes," she said simply. "But if you'd only give up going, Davey!"

Davey's face had a look of his father for the moment, a sombre
obstinacy.

"There's something in the game," he said. "You're on your mettle to
carry it through when you've begun. But you needn't worry. I'll be all
right. My story'll be good enough if there is any trouble."

Deirdre sighed.

"But I can't bear the thought of your going," she said. "If only you
wouldn't!"




CHAPTER XXXIX


Deirdre watched Davey going out of Narrow Valley in the dim starlight of
the early spring morning, the mob, hustled by Teddy and the dogs, a
stream of red and brown and dappled hides before him. The cows lifted
their heads, bellowing protestingly; their breath steamed before them in
the chill air. The horses and dogs, heeling and wheeling them, and the
trampling hoofs of the herd, beat a wraith-like mist from the cold, and
still sleeping earth.

Davey was to steer by the stars till he came to a point on the road that
would give him a clear and easy descent to the sale yards on the
outskirts of Melbourne. It was too late in the year to try the usual
route. He was to take a winding track on the edge of the swamp that lay
between the southern hills and Port Phillip. Only the blacks knew the
paths through the brown-feathered reeds and dense ti-tree scrubs. Conal
had tried to cross it once in the summer and got bogged there, losing a
score of fine beasts. If Conal could not find his way across it, the
Schoolmaster did not think that Davey could. It was only in case of
untoward happenings that he advised trusting to the black boy's
knowledge of the tracks through the swamp, and taking to the cover of
the moss-dark, almost impenetrable, scrub that covered it.

Davey had given his word to the Schoolmaster that if he met Conal he
would give the cattle over to him and return to the hills.

"I'd give everything I've got in the world if you'd never been brought
into this business," he had said, deeply moved, just before Davey rode
out.

"Father's blaming himself, Davey," Deirdre said.

Davey wrung the Schoolmaster's hand.

"I wouldn't have been in it, if I hadn't broken my word to you," he
said. "I promised you when I brought up that first mob for Conal, I'd
clear out after, didn't I? But Conal offered me the job, and--you bet I
wouldn't 've been out of a moonlighting either, if I could 've helped
it."

"But this business--I never meant you to be in it," Farrel said
bitterly. "I never meant to be in it myself, Davey. Circumstances were
too strong for me. A drowning man clutches a straw, they say."

Deirdre had ridden to the valley. She had watched the mob go out across
the plains, watched until men, cattle, horses and dogs, a moving blur in
the mists, disappeared altogether, and the faint lowing of the beasts
came to her no longer.

She waited impatiently for news of Davey, though she knew none could
come for weeks. There were few travellers on this overland track. Conal
and one or two others had used it, with Teddy to guide them if they
wanted to take the short cut across the scrubs of the swamp. There were
well-defined northern paths into New South Wales: but it was a long and
roundabout journey to Port Phillip from the southern ranges.

"Father," Deirdre said impulsively, one morning soon after Davey had
gone. "I'm going to see Mrs. Cameron. I've been thinking she must be
anxious about Davey and wanting news of him."

"She'll be glad to see you, no doubt," he said.

"There's one subject you won't speak to her of, though, Deirdre," he
added after a moment's hesitation.

She knew what he meant. He did not want Mrs. Cameron to know that his
sight was almost gone.

"Yes, I understand," Deirdre said.

Socks, as sensitive to the keen air, the sunshine, the fluty ripplings
and joy-callings of the birds as Deirdre was, rollicked gaily down the
track to Cameron's. His white stockings flashed as he thudded along; his
unshod hoofs fell with a soft beat on the grassy waysides. Deirdre sang
softly to herself as they passed under the arching trees. Her thoughts
went drifting away dreamily to the time when Davey would come back and
she would call going to Ayrmuir, "going home."

It was an eager, tremulous greeting that Mrs. Cameron gave her.

"It's you, dearie," she said. "I am glad to see you, indeed! What can
you tell me of Davey? He was to have come home to us and I haven't seen
him for weeks."

There was much to tell and yet much that the girl, in her tender
solicitude for Davey's mother, could not tell. It would terrify her to
know that someone had shot at and nearly killed him, that Davey had an
enemy who would go to these lengths. When he was back with her, he might
tell her himself what had kept him away; but it would stretch her soul
to the limit of anguish, Deirdre knew, to tell her now.

"Yes, Davey told me he was coming home," Deirdre said, smiling.

Her eyes met Davey's mother's with their secret no secret; but Mary
Cameron was thinking only of her boy, and in her anxiety, although she
realised that Davey and Deirdre understood each other, she did not ask
any questions, and Deirdre said nothing, thinking it was for Davey to
tell his mother.

"I knew you'd be anxious about him," the girl said with a sigh, "and
that's why I came. He's gone overland with some of Maitland's cattle;
but he ought to be back in a week now, and then he'll be coming straight
here."

"Ah, dear!" Tears welled in Mrs. Cameron's eyes. "How glad I'll be."

Deirdre went with her into the well-known parlour, and they sat down and
talked together awhile. There was a new and tender understanding between
them. Mrs. Cameron talked of her loneliness and the joy Davey's
home-coming would be to her.

"Oh, I have prayed so, Deirdre," she said, "It has nearly broken my
heart being without him ... what with the long nights here, and the
sorrow that has come upon us...."

That was all she said of the other trouble, yet it had almost broken
her, and had taken all her fortitude and patient wifeliness to endure.
An instinct of blind fidelity was part of Mary Cameron.

When Deirdre was going she kissed her. There was lingering affection in
the pressure of her lips.

"My heart goes out to you, dear," she said. "It's almost as if you were
my own child. I love you like that, Deirdre. It was good of you to come
to-day. Now I will get Davey's room ready for him ... and the little
room you used to sleep in. You'll be coming to stay with us again when
he comes home, won't you? Oh, I could laugh and cry with happiness to
think the old times will come again."

Deirdre laughed, a little laugh of shy joyousness. She could not tell
Mrs. Cameron that she would be coming to stay with her altogether soon.

"Davey will be able to get on better with his father now," Mrs. Cameron
continued, giving expression to her dreams. "He will be able to get
Donald to do what he wants, without angering him. His father has lost
many of the ways he had, and you wouldn't believe how he loves the boy,
in spite of everything. It's a strange, dour way a man has of loving
sometimes, dear--hard to bear. It's love all the same--not love the way
women love--that tries to make life easy for the dear one. It's all
tenderness and sacrifice a woman's love, Deirdre...."

"Sometimes a man loves that way too," Deirdre said.

She had swung into her saddle and was looking away before her, over the
mist-wreathed hills. For a moment her eyes lay on Mrs. Cameron's face
with its grey-green eyes, delicate contour, exquisite line of lips,
loving and lovable. Her face had lost its youthful freshness, but its
beauty was unimpaired, so tender its expression, so compelling and pure
the light of her eyes, though a lonely soul looked out of them, pained
and wondering.

Deirdre pressed her heels into the chestnut: she and the horse
disappeared among the trees.

She talked of Mrs. Cameron to her father.

"It would break your heart to see the change in her," she said.

"But I can't see her any more," he said brusquely.

Deirdre realised the wound that she had opened. She had never quite
forgiven Davey's mother for the fact that Dan had lost his sight on her
account. Mrs. Cameron never seemed to realise it and that had angered
the girl. Perhaps Mrs. Cameron did not know what the Schoolmaster had
done for her, Deirdre told herself sometimes. But Davey knew and she
could hardly believe that Mrs. Cameron was ignorant, though she never
seemed to take the Schoolmaster's injury as a personal matter.

Deirdre looked down on his face, dark and sombre now. Scarcely anything
of its old reckless gaiety was left. Lines had been carved on it by
bitter thought and brooding on the utter night he was travelling into.

She rubbed her soft cheek against his.

"Tell me," he said, with an effort, "how she looks, Deirdre."

"She looks," the girl said hesitatingly. "She looks--I can't explain
how--as if something that burned inside of her had gone out."

"But she's beautiful--like she used to be," he begged. "She used to have
a way of looking at you that I never saw with anybody else--"

His voice was trembling.

"Yes," Deirdre said slowly. "She's beautiful like she used to be, though
her hair's got grey in it ... and the colour of the pink orchids has
gone out of her skin. And she looks at you that way--I know what you
mean--as if she were seeing ... not only the outside you.... It's her
eyes ... and the way her lips lie together tell you about her real self
and make you love her--even when you don't want to!"

The Schoolmaster threw himself back in his chair.

Deirdre gazed at him, then she turned away with a little sigh.

His face was almost a mirror to her now that he was blind. She could see
his thoughts in it. It was sacred to her, that thin, lined face, all its
reverence and emotion; but she could not bear to look at it and feel
that she was stealing his secrets when his eyes could not guard them
from her.

She went to the seat under the window and sat there thinking, idly,
aimlessly, for awhile. Recollections of Mrs. Cameron were always those
of a woman occupied with her home, her husband and son. Deirdre wondered
how her father came to be in Mrs. Cameron's debt, as he had said he was,
how it was he owed her anything at all. She seemed to owe him so much.

The cows had gathered up to the fence near the bails for the milking.
They were lowing quietly, the sunshine making a luminous mist behind
them; the birds were laughing and hooting among the trees.

Deirdre rose to go and do the milking, but Steve burst open the door
from the tap-room.

A moment before there had been a clatter of hoofs on the shingle. Steve
stood on the threshold, the muscles of his face twitching.

"It's Pete M'Coll from the Wirree," he gasped. "He says--they've got
Davey at Port Phillip for duffing!"




CHAPTER XL


It was early next morning that Cameron's cart with its slowly moving,
heavy grey horse drew up before Steve's, and Mrs. Cameron herself got
down from it.

The Schoolmaster was pacing the long kitchen. He had not been still a
moment since Pete M'Coll brought his news. Pete had gone back to the
Wirree to see if anything more had been heard of Davey, whether he was
to be brought back to the district for trial, or was being held in
Melbourne. The story of his arrest had come through on the vessel that
brought stores to Port Southern, but it was very vague. A rumour had
reached the _Albatross_ an hour or two before she was sailing that a
young man saying he was David Cameron--Young Davey--Cameron of Ayrmuir's
son, had been arrested for cattle-stealing, and that he and a <DW65>
were being detained on the charge. Pete had not returned, but the
Schoolmaster set about making preparations for a journey. Deirdre had
packed his tucker bag; his blanket was rolled up to strap on his saddle.

"Which way are you going?" Deirdre asked.

She knew that the schooner would probably be gone before he could reach
the Port, and that it would continue its passage along the coast to Rane
before turning back and making for Port Phillip. He had thought of all
that too.

"I'll ride," he said.

"What are you going to do," she asked anxiously.

"I don't know!"

Out of the chaos of his thoughts no plan of action had yet formed.

Then Mrs. Cameron came. Deirdre brought her into the kitchen.

"It's Mrs. Cameron, father," she said, and left them.

Farrel turned in the direction of her voice. He made a movement towards
Mrs. Cameron, who was standing just within the doorway. His hand went
out with a seeking motion.

"I ... I can't see you," he said, a little querulously.

Her hand met his.

She knew from his face the desperate and troubled state of mind he was
in, and he, hers, from her fluttered breath and the sob that went with
it.

"I've come to ask you to keep a promise," she said.

"Yes?"

"You remember the promise?"

For a moment he did not remember any words--any formal undertaking; but
he knew to what she referred.

"You said ... long ago," her voice was scarcely audible, "that if ever
you could do anything for me or mine--"

"Yes," he said. "If ever I can do anything, I want to."

She sank into a chair. Her hands flew to her bonnet strings. She untied
them.

"You know what it is I want you to do?" she asked.

"Yes."

He felt for his chair. It was near the one she had taken. He sat down
and turned his face towards her. He could just see a dim outline of her
against the morning brightness. To him she was a grey figure with a
heavy black shadow about her. He strained to meet her eyes again. The
very magic of them seemed to illumine her face for him, show him its
beautiful outlines. And yet perhaps, he did not see them at all. It was
all memory and vivid imagining that gave him the illusion. He did not
see her face, thin and lined with pain and loneliness, the patience and
vague disappointment that had come to dwell in her eyes.

"I want you to get the boy off for me ... to have this charge removed,"
she said, tremulously.

The Schoolmaster knew that this was what he had meant to try to do; but
now that she had asked him, he told himself that it must be done. The
means employed to lift the burden of blame from Davey's shoulders he
knew--would have to be very sure ones. Davey, himself, would not say
anything to implicate Conal or anyone else. Evidently the story of his
droving for Donald Cameron had not carried much weight.

"Yes," the Schoolmaster said, "I will."

He had no doubt of himself now that she had appealed to him.

"Oh," she cried, after a few moments. "I knew that it was some mischief
to us McNab was planning. I can see it all now. I thought it was you, or
Conal, he was trying to get at. McNab told Donald that cattle were being
moonlighted--most of them Ayrmuir breakaways and wild cattle--at the
back of our hills. But he did not know that Davey was droving for Conal,
not till he asked me this morning, and I told him. I didn't know myself
till a few days ago, when Davey came to me after church. Then he said
he'd been working with Conal, and I begged him not to any more, and told
him what his father and McNab were trying to do. He promised to come
home, but he never came. I was afraid to tell his father for fear he'd
never forgive him, and every day I thought Davey'd be coming in the
gate. McNab knew, of course. Everybody else in the Wirree seems to have
known, but us, that Davey was with Conal. It was to bring our pride in
the dust, to make Davey's father the shamed and disgraced man he is, he
did it. But Where's Conal? How is it he's not there with Davey? Why did
Davey ever go in for this business? Why are you in it? I thought that
you would never be doing anything again that would bring you under the
law."

The distress and reproach in her voice hurt him.

"I thought so too," he said bitterly.

He did not attempt to excuse himself; and the sightless eyes that gazed
at her did not accuse.

His mind was back to the subject between them.

"This is the concern of two men, I and another," he said. "Davey was no
more than a hired drover. Besides--"

"Where is Conal?" Mrs. Cameron asked.

"Away."

His tone forbade further inquiry.

There was silence a moment.

"How does Mr. Cameron take it?"

"He's broken altogether."

"Would he"--the Schoolmaster hesitated--"would he consent to say that
Davey was droving for him. There were D.C. cows in the mob."

Mrs. Cameron hesitated.

"I think he would do anything--anything in the world to get the boy
off," she said.

"I don't know that it would do ... whether it would work," the
Schoolmaster said a little wearily. "Probably Davey has said that he was
putting the mob through for his father. He said he would if anything
happened. If inquiries are made, will you tell Mr. Cameron to back up
the story ... it's the only chance. Davey may have been only detained
until it could be ascertained whether he is Donald Cameron's son and
whether Cameron authorised him to sell the cattle. It would be a
splendid opportunity to spoil McNab's game, if it could be done.... But
if, for some reason I don't know of yet, it can't be worked, there's
another way."

"You mean you'll say you were responsible. Davey was only a drover with
you," Mrs. Cameron asked.

"Yes."

She uttered a little cry.

"It was what I meant you to do, but I can't bear to think of it," she
said.

She covered her face with her hands.

The Schoolmaster was thinking deeply too; the iron of despair had
entered his soul.

"What will it mean?" she asked, looking up at him.

"Three years hard labour on the roads of the Colony or other place as
the judge may direct," he quoted, his voice a little uncertain.

"Tell me," she said, rising, a tide of feeling carrying fire to her
eyes, dignity to her figure and a subtle timbre to her voice, "would you
rather I had not come? Would you rather I had let Davey take his
punishment? I'm not sure that he does not deserve it in spite of what
you say."

"No!" Farrel cried, passionately.

He grasped her hand. His face fell over it.

"It is the best thing in the world ... for me ... to do something for
you," he said.

Mrs. Cameron caught her breath when for a moment he carried her fingers
to his lips.

"You'll look after Deirdre," he said, "if--"

"Yes."

She stood uncertainly looking at him, a pitiful, quivering emotion in
her eyes; then she moved away.

"Good-bye," he said, mechanically, hearing the brush of her garments as
she left the room.

"Good-bye," she said.

Deirdre saw that Mrs. Cameron's cheeks were wet with tears when she
climbed into the buggy again. She did not speak, but drove silently
away.

Deirdre had been rubbing Bess's nose and feeding her with handfuls of
grass. When she went back to the kitchen her father was sitting with his
arms over the side of his chair, his head on them. She flew to him; her
arms entwined him. But he pushed her away, with unconscious roughness.

"Go away!" he whispered.

An angry pain at his grief, at Mrs. Cameron who in some way had been the
cause of it, surged through Deirdre.

Pete M'Coll rode into the yard. He threw his bridle over the hitching
post.

"Any news?" Deirdre asked.

He shook his head and went into the kitchen.

Later the Schoolmaster called Steve in. She heard Steve's voice raised
complainingly, her father's, with settled determination, against it. Her
heart was sore. Why was he not telling her his plans as he was telling
Steve?

She heard him arranging to take Pete with him to Melbourne.

"I'm going too, father," she cried, flashing into the kitchen. "What
have I done that you shouldn't tell me what you are going to do. You're
talking to every one else, and my heart's breaking."

The Schoolmaster drew her into his arms. "You're not coming, dear," he
said. "You're best out of this. I want you to wait here with Steve till
Davey comes back."

"And you too, father?"

He held her close in his arms.

"Yes, me too, of course, darling."

He crushed her face against his.

"It's great times we've had together, my darling, isn't it?" he asked.
"I don't like going without you, but it's better. It's great times we've
had together ... and now I'm an old blind devil that wouldn't be able to
look after you properly in the town. It's not a nice place for a girl to
be going about in, and I'd be no good to look after you--no more than a
burden. Pete here'll be my guide and take me by the track round the
swamp to Melbourne. He says he couldn't do the short cut across the
swamp, but he knows the roundabout track all right. We'll have to be
busy on Davey's account then. You'll be a good wife to Davey, won't you,
darling? And happy as the day's long when he gets back. But you do love
me, too, don't you, darling black head? For God's sake say you love me."

His voice broke.

Deirdre flung her arms about him, reckless of all but that some trouble
within had forced that cry. There was a bitter undertone in his words
that she did not understand, although she associated them in some way
with Davey's mother and the disturbance and mental turmoil into which
Davey's arrest had put him.

"I love you," she cried, "more than all the world--more than Davey, more
than anyone or anything in it!"

He stooped and kissed her.

"What a jealous brute I am," he murmured, "to have taken that from you."

"There's nothing you haven't told me?" she asked, searching his face.

"No," he replied, turning his face from her and burying it in her hair.

"You haven't told me anything at all of what you're going to do to get
Davey off," she said sharply.

"Oh, well," he parried. "I don't know ...I haven't decided ... it will
depend upon circumstances."

He recognised the anxiety of her voice.

"You aren't going to try and get him off by putting yourself in his
place, are you?" she asked, doubtfully. "You've really been less in the
thing than he has, and he's young and strong and--"

"Oh no," the Schoolmaster laughed lightly. "I wouldn't try to do that!"

He went out to the stable-yard. When the Kangaroo was saddled, he took
Deirdre in his arms again.

She watched him cantering down the road on the great raking grey,
towards the inland plains, Pete M'Coll, on one of Steve's horses, a few
yards behind him. The thought of that cry of his troubled her. Why had
he said: "For God's sake, say you love me!"

The flood of her love for him rose and filled her, the love of all those
early years, when he had been mother, brother and playfellow. Little
pictures of his tenderness, of his gay good-fellowship, of his care,
flitted before her. Because for years it had moved so tranquilly, she
had scarcely realised the depth and power of that passionate affection,
but now that he had called for it, showed his need of it, as he had
never done even in the old days, it surged tempestuously.




CHAPTER XLI


"So the Schoolmaster's swearin' young Davey Cameron was no more than a
hired drover to him," said McNab.

He was talking to Steve.

"What's that you're saying?"

Deirdre came to the doorway.

McNab had just arrived. A skinny, raw-boned boy from the Wirree was
taking his horse and cart to the stables. She had seen it draw up a few
minutes before and wondered why McNab had come. She had heard Steve's
greeting to him and McNab's reply.

"Oh, there you are, Deirdre," he said, shuffling towards her and holding
out his hand. She disregarded it, looking into his eyes.

McNab was in a good temper. The smile wrinkling the skin about his mouth
told that he had some secret cause for being well pleased with himself
and the world at large. He could afford to forgive her.

"What's that you were saying about father?" she asked.

"Haven't you heard? Why it's out of the world you are here, Steve. It's
the talk of Wirreeford this business of young Davey duffin'! And the
Schoolmaster says it's none of Davey Cameron's business, but his. I
wasn't sure Farrel was in it meself, before--had me suspicions of
course--but nothing to go on. Conal's business I knew it was; but the
devil who gave him long legs knows where he is. He knew when to leave.
Smells a sinking ship like a rat at sea, Conal does."

Neither Deirdre nor Steve spoke. McNab's eyes wandered from one to the
other of them. He continued, chuckling, as though enjoying the joke:

"He's saying--the Schoolmaster--that Young Davey was a good stockman,
and when he quarrelled with his father he gave him a job and was paying
him wages, reg'lar, till he got something else to do, or went home
again. And there was no more to it than that. Davey, of course, tried to
bluff things out at first; but there was an information out, signed by
Cameron, so the story wouldn't wash that he was on D.C.'s business."

Deirdre clenched her hands as McNab giggled; there was a malicious, slow
glimmer in his eyes as they rested on her.

"When Cameron got a suspicion someone was liftin' cattle from the back
hills, he was busy enough givin' information --keen enough to catch the
moonlighters! But he didn't reck'n on his boy being taken in charge of a
mob.

"Troopers in Melbourne didn't believe Davey's yarn about being his
father's son, seein' they'd got Donald Cameron's written word against
mobs coming from the South to the markets thereabouts. Farrel's story is
a good 'un. He says he struck a bargain with Donald Cameron, as agent
for Maitland & Co., stock and store dealers, of Cooburra, New South
Wales, a couple of years ago. These beasts were to have gone over the
border when next some of Maitland's stockmen were in the South; but the
rivers were down, the stock rollin' fat, and prices up, so he thought it
a pity to lose the market, and sent Young Davey with 'm round the swamp
to Melbourne yards, not telling him details of the deal. Davey havin'
had a difference with his father was glad of the job; it's a sort of
challenge to Cameron. Clever of the Schoolmaster! I wonder what D.C.'ll
do about it He can see it's a let-off for Davey, if he stands to it, a
let-off for the Schoolmaster too. If he doesn't--well, I think Davey, 'n
your father, my dear, 'll spend a bit of time on the roads.

"The queer part of the business is that though half a dozen men's beasts
may be in the mob, the brands've been so neatly faked, no one can swear
to 'em. All the clear skins've got Maitland's brand on. So the charge of
cattle-stealin' 'll stand or fall be what Cameron says--or does. A
couple of white-faced cows with D.C. on 'm are the only give-aways in
the lot!"

"He won't put his own son away," blurted Steve.

"P'raps! P'raps not!"

McNab fidgeted.

"Hardly likely!" Deirdre cried.

"Mick Ross 'n Bud Morrison were in here, couple of nights ago," Steve
went on. "And they said they'd swear blind none of their beasts were in
the lot. All the hill settler's 'd be prepared to do the same, they
said--rather than put Davey or the Schoolmaster in a fix."

"Y--es," snarled McNab, "so I'm told!"

Deirdre laughed. His disgust and disappointment delighted her.

"You didn't reckon on that, did you, Mr. McNab," she said.

She went off down the road to the paddock where Steve's two milking cows
were, and presently, drove them, one swinging before the other, into the
yard at the back of the shanty. She was easier in her mind than she had
been since the Schoolmaster had gone--even since Davey rode out of
Narrow Valley. But the sight of McNab disturbed her. She bailed and
leg-roped the cows. Wondering why he had come, as she milked, and the
milk fell with a gentle swish into the pail between her knees, she could
not believe that it was merely to bring them the good news that Davey
and the Schoolmaster were likely to get off.

She turned the cows into the paddock beside the bails and took the pail
of warm, sweet-smelling milk indoors.

When she went into the kitchen McNab was sitting in the big chair by the
fire. He looked up at her. The firelight showed his face and the smile
that glimmered on it. He seemed to be remembering, and with triumph,
that other night when he had sat there.

Steve, crouched on the bench opposite him, was shivering and sobbing.

Deirdre put the milk in its place.

"What's the matter? What have you done to him?" she cried, facing McNab.

He took a heavy chain from his pocket. It clanked with a dull, slow
sound.

Steve started from his chair.

"Oh, send him away, Deirdre, send him away!" he sobbed.

Deirdre knew the meaning of the trick. She had heard it often. It was an
old dodge to discover escaped convicts, this clanking of a chain near
them. A man who had worn irons never forgot the sound they made, and
whenever he heard it would start and tremble. The rage that burned to a
white heat kept her silent a moment.

"You'd never 've thought it, would you, Deirdre? Him a lag, and you a
lag's daughter?" McNab chuckled.

"It's a lie!"

"Is it? You ask--Uncle Steve. It's been a puzzle to me, more'n eighteen
years, why two chaps from the Island never came for the help that was
promised 'm, and they with a reward out against them. I knew they'd got
safe up the river because a boat was found on the bank, beyond where
M'Laughlin's is now. I meant to touch a bit of that reward, too, but
it's never too late to mend, as they say."

"You'd never send us back to the Island?" Steve cried. "You'd never do
that, McNab?"

"Wouldn't I?"

McNab laughed softly. He was enjoying the spectacle of Steve's
whimpering, the trembling of his withered limbs--the sense of power that
it gave him.

"You--" Deirdre gasped; but anger choked her.

"There, now," he interrupted. "I wouldn't be calling me names, if I were
you, Deirdre. After the pretty way you treated me a month or two ago,
too. Would you be forgettin', my dear? It would be a pity to make an
enemy of me, as I said once before. It's a bad enemy I make, they say,
and a nasty temper I've got when I'm roused. But there's nothing I
wouldn't do for you, Deirdre. You can twist me round your little finger
if you like."

The firelight was in his eyes.

"See here, Steve," he said. "I've got something to say to Deirdre. She's
a sensible girl, got her head well-screwed on. We're old pals, me 'n
Deirdre. You go outside while I talk things over with her. We'll see
what can be done."

Steve scuttled across the room. He was crying helplessly, and pulled his
coat sleeve across his nose as he went to the door.

"Now," McNab said genially, "you sit there, Deirdre, and we can talk."

Deirdre took the chair Steve had left. She sat very stiff and straight
in it. She knew what was coming. There were fear and loathing in her
eyes. But McNab only saw how great and dark they were, how red the curve
of her lips, how full of vigour and grace the lines of her strong, young
body.

"You know what'll happen if it's known Farrel's an escaped convict?" he
asked.


"Yes."

"Port Arthur, irons 'n the rest of it! Well, nobody need know, lest I
like. There's a couple of lads can prove who Steve and y'r father are,
but they won't--lest I like."

"What are you going to like? That's what I want to know," Deirdre cried,
her hands gripping the arms of the chair.

"Depends on you, my dear!"

He leant forward.

There was appeal in her eyes. But her eagerness, her hunted wild-bird
air only stirred in McNab a lust for the capture and taming of her.

"If you promise to marry me, nothing'll be heard of it," he said.

Deirdre was not surprised. She had expected something like what he had
said. The sound of it stunned her nevertheless.

"P'raps the Schoolmaster'll get off this affair of the cattle, but
that's only three years," McNab said. "The other'd be till the
expiration of his sentence, probably for the end of his life, my dear;
'n Steve--a month or two'd be the end of him! You're the price of their
freedom. You pays y'r money and takes y'r choice, Deirdre."

Deirdre did not hear him. After all, she was thinking, this was a
proposition. She was even grateful for it. Anything seemed better than
helplessness, hopelessness--the terrible prospect of not being able to
avert this ultimate catastrophe which threatened Dan. All that had been
sensitive to joy or sorrow in her seemed dead. She realised only one
overwhelming necessity. One fact, crowding out all others, filled her
mind. Thad McNab had said that Dan would have to go back to the Island
and that she could prevent it. She did not think of Davey at all, except
to remember, vaguely, that she had promised to marry him, and that now
she was going to break her promise and say that she would marry McNab,
if--

She looked at him as he sat by the hearth. Misshapen, with unkempt,
brakish hair and beard, turning grey, wrinkled and withered, he was no
mate for her glowing youth! But what did that matter? She saw the
Schoolmaster's face as she had last seen it--the dear, thin, eager face
with deep lines, drawn by the sleepless ache of his heart, on it. She
knew now why there had been an underlying grief and bitterness in what
he said when he went away; knew that he must have been afraid of
recognition and its consequences. But Mrs. Cameron had required him to
save Davey. It was all plain now. Yet Deirdre realised that what he had
done he would probably have done without her having to ask for it. What
part had Mrs. Cameron had in his life that she could command him--that
she dared ask him to lay down his life for her? What had she done for
him? In the old time the Schoolmaster had said: "We owe her more than
either you or I can hope to repay, Deirdre." But surely he had paid--on
the night of the fires if at no other time. And now--

McNab's gaze on her recalled her mind to what he had said.

She met it steadily, unwaveringly.

Yes. She would marry him, if--Her thought went back on its track. If
what? Yes, if Dan got off--if he did not get the three years. If he had
to go to prison for three years, then it would be no use to marry McNab.
He could not help Dan then. For three years he would have to live in a
prison, wear filthy, hideous clothes, work like a beast of burden.

"I'll tell you this day week," she said.

"Think you'll know then how the trial's goin'," he snarled. "Well,
there's an end to three years, don't forget, my pretty, and if he gets
an acquittal on this, the other'll come out, unless--"

She measured him with her eyes.

"You marry me the day he is free of this charge--if he gets free--or on
the day he gets his three years--if he's goin' to get them, and you
don't want 'm to be for life."

He leaned forward, his voice husky with eagerness.

"If you change y'r mind, my dear, of course I can change mine."

He laughed uneasily, his fingers twitching.

"But I'll give you till this day week to make up y'r mind which it is to
be. Then you give me y'r answer. Is it a bargain?"

"Yes," Deirdre said. She was dull and weary--beaten.

He rose from his chair and shuffled towards the door.

"Then I'll go and get the house ready for you," he cried, gleefully.
"I'm not afraid what y'r answer'll be. Oh, you're snared, my pretty
bird, and there's no way out for you, if you'd keep Dan Farrel, as he
calls himself, out of the darbies, and him in his blindness, going to
the Island again! It's taken a heap of schemin' to get you--but I set my
mind on you when I saw you a slip of a girl coquettin' with Conal, at
Hegarty's--the night you came back to the Wirree."

The desolation of her attitude reassured him.

"Good-bye, my pretty," he said in the doorway. "And someday, when y'r my
wife, Deirdre, you'll kiss me good-bye."

He went out with a chattering clatter of laughter.

Steve came back to the kitchen.

"Have you been able to manage him, Deirdre?" he asked, feverishly. "What
have you said to him? To go back there--"

His face worked pitifully; his hands twisted over each other.

"You don't know what it is like. I'd kill myself rather than go back,
Deirdre. And your father! What'll he do? It'll be worse for him than for
me. He's got you to think of. What did McNab say? Will he do anything
for you, Deirdre? He said he would do anything in the world for you. And
you'd want him to help us, wouldn't you? You wouldn't let Dan and y'r
old Uncle Stevie, go over there again?"

"It'll be all right," she said, looking past him. "You mustn't think of
it any more, Stevie. It was just to worry you, he said that."

"Oh, it's a wonderful girl you are!" He clung to her hand, fondling it,
tears streaming down his cheeks. "Nobody here to save us, your father
and me, but you, Deirdre! And you to deal with McNab--send him away with
a smile--pleased with himself."

No idea of the terms McNab was likely to have made with her occurred to
him.

"If only there'd been someone here to help us," she cried passionately.
"If only father, or Davey, or even Conal, had been here! But to have had
to meet it alone."

Her voice broke. She began to cry, finding relief in utter abandonment.
Steve put his arms round her, trying to comfort her.

"Deirdre! Deirdre!" he muttered distressfully. "Don't cry! It's your
father's own girl you are. So brave! Meetin' the devil himself with your
clear eyes, 'n me no more than a shiverin' old corpse where he is!"

Deirdre lifted her eyes. She looked into the pathetic quiveringly
childish, old face bent over her.

"It's the best thing you could have said to me--that I'm my father's own
girl, Uncle Stevie," she said, "My father's girl shouldn't be crying
like this when there's work--and a lot of thinking to do."




CHAPTER XLII


"There's bad news from Cameron's, Deirdre."

Steve came in from the road.

A bullock wagon had just passed from the Wirree. Deirdre had seen it
halt up. She had seen the bullocks standing with dumb, dull patience
under the yoke, swinging their tails to keep the flies off. Some of them
had gone down on their knees by the roadside, while the teamster had a
drink and yarned with Steve. Then she had heard the cracking of the
teamster's whip, his oaths and calls to the beasts, and the creaking of
the heavy, blue-washed cart as it went on again.

"What is it?" she asked breathlessly, thinking of Davey.

"Old Cameron," Steve said. "Johnny Watson says he was found dead on the
road by Long Gully--a tree fallen on him--this morning."

"Steve!"

There was horror, and yet a vague relief, in her exclamation.

"Johnny says, Cameron went down to the Black Bull yesterday evening, and
there was trouble between him and McNab--McNab having let him in for
this cattle stealin' case, knowing Davey was in it," Steve went on. "But
Thad got round him somehow, telling him that he didn't know Davey was in
it, and he'd get off, anyhow, bein' Cameron's son. Buttered the old man
up that way. Conal and the Schoolmaster'd be nabbed for sure, he made
out. They were good enough friends when they parted only he'd had more'n
a jugful, and a couple of the boys had to give him a leg-up to his
horse. The brute must've shied at the dead tree near the gully, the
ground was cut up round it. It fell on them both. Mrs. Cameron found 'm
this morning."

"I'll go and see if there's anything I can do for her."

Deirdre took her hat down from behind the door.

Steve went on talking of Donald Cameron, muttering in his vague,
childish fashion.

"However he came to get in with McNab I can't make out," he said. "There
weren't no two greater enemies a while back. Oh, he was as mean as you
make them, D.C., but he made his mark in the country."

Deirdre had on her hat.

"I'm going, Steve," she said. "I won't stay unless Mrs. Cameron's got no
one with her; but the Rosses and Mrs. Morrison are sure to be there."

"Right, Deirdre!" he replied.

She took her bridle from its nail by the door, and went into the paddock
beyond the stable, calling the chestnut. He heard her cry: "Coup lad!
coup laddie!" and saw the white-stocking, at her call, come galloping
across the newly-green grass, gilded with sunshine. She slipped the
bridle over his head, brought him into the yard, saddled him and turned
out to the road.

With thoughts of the tragedy that had befallen Mrs. Cameron, as she went
along the winding track under the trees, were woven wonderings as to how
Donald Cameron's sudden death would affect Davey and the Schoolmaster.

It was on the roadside by the Long Gully that Mr. Cameron had died. The
old tree by the gully had fallen at last, and on Donald Cameron. At
Rane, while Dan and she were living there, a man had been killed by a
falling tree, but it was strange that Davey's father should have died in
this way, she thought, he who had been the first settler in the hills.

She wondered if he had ring-barked the tree--score its living green
wood--if he had killed it, and in turn it had killed him, pinning him to
the earth with its great bulk of dead and rotting timber. She could see
Davey's father, heavy, squarely-built, in shabby, dark clothes, lying
beneath it, his grey hair blood-dabbled, his face bruised and blackened.
The man who had conquered the wilderness had lain there, on the very
road he had made, broken, cast aside--a thing that life had done with.
It was as if the wilderness had taken its revenge.

She slipped from the chestnut's back in a sunny clearing and gathered a
handful of freckled and golden-eyed, white honey-flowers, twisted some
tendrils of creepers and blades of ferns among them, and tied them
together with a long piece of grass.

When she came in sight of the weatherboard house crouching against the
purple wall of the hills, Deirdre realised again what Donald Cameron had
done. The cleared paddocks spread round it on every side. An orchard
climbing the <DW72> to the left showed in dark leafage against the grey
and green of the forest. Cattle dappled the furthest hillside. The barns
and sheds and stables behind the house formed a small village. He had
made it, cleared the forest for it. He had done all this, she realised,
and so much besides, and now he was dead, the man of iron will and
indefatigable energy.

There were two or three of the neighbours' carts in Cameron's yard.

Deirdre opened the gate and shut it when she and White Socks had passed
through. She hung the chestnut's bridle over a post by the barn, and
lifted his saddle.

Speckled fowls and handsome buff and yellow pullets stalked about the
yard, pecking industriously even under the legs of the Ross's and
Morrison's horses, which, with harness looped back on them, their noses
deep in fodder bags, stood beside the carts. In the brilliant sunshine,
on a wood-stack, struck against the clear blue sky, a black rooster
crowed at intervals.

Mrs. Cameron's sitting-room was in semi-darkness. Deirdre heard the
hushed talking, exclamations and sound of weeping as she went into it.

"It's you, Deirdre!" Mrs. Cameron said when she saw the girl. Her voice
was flat and tired; she seemed to have scarcely strength enough to
speak.

Deirdre kissed her with quivering lips, and eyes welling.

The room was full of people. She did not see who they were at first in
the half dark.

"If only Davey were here!" Mrs. Cameron cried.

Deirdre knelt beside her.

"Perhaps he'll come," she whispered.

"Did you gather the flowers for his father?"

Mrs. Cameron's eyes had fallen on the little bouquet in Deirdre's hands.

"I brought them for Davey," Deirdre said.

Mrs. Cameron's hands quivered in hers.

"We must keep her cheerful, not let her spirits get down," one of the
visitors said in Deirdre's ear.

Jessie Ross brought in tea, and some newly-made scones.

"You must eat this now, dear, to keep up your strength," Mrs. Ross said
to Mrs. Cameron, taking a chair beside her.

Mrs. Ross talked of her milking, and the calves she had poddied during
the wet weather; and the other women, gathering round, talked in serious
and melancholy fashion of their milking and the calves they had had
trouble with during the winter. They gave each other recipes for cream
cheese, and jam, and cakes to be made without eggs.

"And I've discovered a sure way of making hens lay in the winter," said
Mrs. Ross.

"Have you?" replied Mrs. Cameron, listlessly.

"Yes, indeed, and I'll tell you just what it is, Mary!"

"Oh, it's of no interest to me now, with Davey away and his father
gone," Mrs. Cameron cried.

She kept her hold of Deirdre's hand.

"To think of him--Davey's father--in there, Deirdre --lying so still and
cold, he that was so strong and nobody could break, or turn," she said.
"You haven't seen him yet. You must come with me."

"Presently, dearie, but you must drink your tea and eat this little bit
of scone first," Mrs. Ross said.

The neighbours talked again nervously, cheerfully, in subdued tones, of
the weather, the sales, and what the men of their households were saying
about things in general.

"We mustn't let her brood," they said anxiously to each other.

Mrs. Cameron did not seem to hear or notice them. When she stood in the
silent room with Deirdre looking down on the white-sheeted figure of
Davey's father, she turned to the girl with a sharp cry.

"It's a sad, sad thing to be parting from your life's mate, Deirdre,"
she said. "To think that he should have died like that ... after all
that he's done--he that made this hill country. To have gone without a
word from anyone, or a clearing-up of the misunderstandings between us.
And Davey not to see him again!"

She broke down and sobbed utterly.

Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Morrison took her, each by an arm, and led her back
to the sitting-room. The hum of strained, subdued and cheerful
conversation began again.

Mrs. Cameron went to the door with Deirdre.

"If only they'd let me be, child!" she cried, kissing her. "If only
they'd let me be. It's very good of them all to bother, but if only
they'd let me be!"

As the chestnut padded softly along the track home to Steve's, Deirdre
wondered again what effect Donald Cameron's death would have on Davey
and Dan. It would make Davey a rich man, she knew. Donald Cameron had
been reputed wealthy when she and the Schoolmaster first came to the
hills, and he had not been drinking long enough to have squandered much
money. "It would take more than a gallon of rum to make old Cameron
loosen his purse strings," she remembered having heard Conal say.

To Dan and to her it would make very little difference in the end. There
would still be McNab. The train of her thought snapped. For a moment,
with all her passionate youth, she envied Donald Cameron his stillness.

A night and a day remained before she would have to tell McNab that she
had made her choice. Every beat of the chestnut's hoofs on the soft
roadside drove what he had said into her brain. She knew no more now
than she did a week ago what was going to happen to Davey and the
Schoolmaster, or how the case was going. Perhaps less, since Donald
Cameron's death. But her mind was made up as to what McNab's answer
would be. She had never really had any doubt as to what it must be, and
had asked for time as one asks to have the window open before settling
down to passing the day in a dark and airless room.

Deep in her mind there was still, however, a vagrant hope, a fairy,
child-like thing, a phantom assurance of the impossibility of what was
demanded of her, a belief, like thistle-down, as faint and fragile, that
something unheard of, miraculous, would happen to help her, and at the
same time save Dan and Steve and Davey.




CHAPTER XLIII


The big kitchen was very quiet. The log that had been smouldering on the
open hearth all day broke. Deirdre swept back the scattered embers and
thrust the broken ends of wood together. Flames leapt over them,
lighting the room.

They penetrated the shadows that bulked, huge and shapeless, at the end
of it, revealing a hoard of store casks and boxes piled almost to the
roof and half-cloaked with hessian bags sewed together. The barrel of a
rifle slung on the walls glimmered for a moment; the firelight showed
stirrup irons and miscellaneous harnessing gear, halters and bridles
hung over a peg near the door, a couple of horse-shoes nailed to it, and
two or three hams in smoke-blackened bags with bunches of herbs beside
them, strung up to the rafters.

A tallow dip cast a halo of garish light about Deirdre where she sat
sewing; a broad gleam touched the crockery on the shelves behind her.
The high-backed arm-chair in which Steve lay, slack and nodding
drowsily, was drawn up before the fire.

The door to the bar, reached by a step from the kitchen, was open. A dip
burned on the bench there, too, giving the dingy windows of the shanty a
gleam for wayfarers. It was a wild night; the wind blowing from the
south-west beat against the doors and rattled the windows of the frail
building. The doors were all shut though it was still early.

Steve at last fell asleep in his chair. His heavy-laboured breathing had
the sound of a child sobbing. Deirdre looked up from her work, again and
again, troubled by it. It increased her sense of desperation to hear
him. The sound became unendurable. She got up at last and awakened him.

"Hadn't you better go to bed, Uncle Steve," she said, impatiently.
"You'll catch your death of cold like this. It's too late for anybody to
be coming our way now--and a bad night. I'll lock up."

"Yes, Deirdre," he murmured sleepily; "it's a bad night and too late for
anybody to be coming our way."

She pulled the bolts across the doors at the front of the shanty and
locked and bolted the door from the bar into the kitchen; then she took
his arm, and helped him out of his chair. He had fallen back into it,
nodding drowsily again. She led him over to his room, which opened off
the kitchen.

"I'll see the lights and the fires are out," she said, "but I want to
finish a bit of mending before I go to bed."

"Right," he murmured. "Right, Deirdre!"

The noise of the wind carried off the droning tones of his voice; but it
was only a few moments before she heard his heavy breathing again.

The Schoolmaster's sock which she was darning dropped from her hand.

She stared into the darkness beyond the dip-light. She did not want to
go to bed--to be alone in the darkness with her thoughts. In the kitchen
she heard the creaking gossip of the fire and the whisper of falling
embers. Besides, she wanted to keep her hands and brain busy. In the
darkness there would be only the voice of the wind in her ears, and that
was like the crying of her heart. She listened to the wind now. A
mournful, passionate thing, it murmured about the house, rising wildly,
desperately, in blasts of sudden rage, and fell back into a thin,
pitiful wailing of helplessness and despair. She was afraid to listen
long, afraid of what this communicating, interpreting murmur might do
with her reason. Yet the wind was with her, she thought. The wind knew
her heart--the wind was the voice of her heart crying out there in the
darkness.

She shivered, trying to banish the strange, fantastical ideas that
swarmed upon her.

How to pass the night--this long night in which she must not think, or
feel. To-morrow McNab would be coming. "You pays y'r money and you takes
y'r choice, Deirdre," he had said. She saw his face as he had spoken,
his twisted, sallow face, the glimmering of his malicious eyes, with the
smile that spilled over from them. She had made her choice. She had set
her mind to it. There must be no wavering. If the Schoolmaster got off,
she must marry McNab; if he was sentenced to three years imprisonment
there would perhaps be time to scheme and out-manoeuvre him. She would
set her wits to that. But she could not think of the next day. She must
think of Davey, or Dan, or Steve--any of them. There must be no
shrinking, shrieking, or failing. What had to be done, had to be done,
and the first thing that had to be done was to give McNab her word.

She picked up the sock she had been mending again. The needle slipped
backwards and forwards, across, under and over, the dark threads. She
worked steadily.

The voice of the wind drew her mind again. It tugged gently and then
carried her away on its plaintive wailing. Her hands fell in her lap as
she listened. Her heart swayed; it went out to the wind again.

There was a clatter of a horse's hoofs on the road. The sound startled
her; but it was not until she heard the dogs barking in the yard that
she realised some late rider had come to Steve's, that there would be
food and drink, and probably a shakedown, to get ready. She waited for
the sound of footsteps on the verandah and a rap on the door of the bar.
The back-door flung open, and on a gust of wind and rain, a tall, gaunt
figure swung into the kitchen.

"Conal!" Deirdre cried, and flew to him.

In her gladness at seeing him the past was a blurred page. She forgot it
when she saw him in the doorway, his weather-beaten face turned to her.
Her confidence in him, all the old joyous affection, rushed over her.

His face was shining with rain, his hair and beard wet. From the way his
breath came and went, and the muscles were whipped out from his neck,
she knew that he had been riding hard.

"They tell me Davey and Dan are on trial in Melbourne," he said.

"Yes."

"What happened? What's been doing, Deirdre?" he gasped. "I've only just
heard of it. It's taken me a couple of days to get here. I don't know
anything but what I've told you. Thought p'raps you could tell me
something before I go up to them. And give me something to eat and
drink.... I haven't had anything since yesterday morning."

He wrenched off his wet coat and dropped into Steve's chair.

He had a gauntness that Conal used not to have. But his eyes, those eyes
of fierce tenderness, were the eyes of the big brotherly man who had
been the companion of so many of her and the Schoolmaster's wanderings.

She quickly put some food on the table for him, set the kettle on the
bar over the fire, and while he was eating told him what she knew of
Davey's arrest and Dan's going to swear Davey's innocence of the charge
brought against him.

"Why did he do that? Davey was more in it than he was," Conal asked
savagely.

"I don't know," Deirdre hesitated. "Yes, I do, Conal. It was because
Mrs. Cameron--"

"Oh, that was it, was it?"

Conal went on eating, hungrily.

"What do they say about here? Do they think Davey'll get off and Dan'll
have to pay?"

"You've heard of Mr. Cameron's death, Conal?" Deirdre asked. "They say
that'll make all the difference. Davey can't very well be accused of
stealing his own cattle, and McNab--"

"What has he got to say about it? Of course it's his hand in it all."

"He says ... I'm the cause...."

Her voice faltered.

"What's that?"

Conal's knife and fork clattered to the table.

"Did you know ..." she asked, "did you know, Conal, Steve and father
came from the Island over there?"

He moved, uneasily.

"No," he said, but uncertainly. "Who says so?"

"McNab. He did the chain trick here on Steve--scared him to death when
he was by himself one afternoon. Seems he wasn't quite sure before, but
Steve in his fright gave him all the proofs he wanted. And McNab's
promised to use all he knows against father and Steve unless--Says he
only put the troopers on to this cattle business to get you and Davey
out of the way, though he had another score to work off against Mr.
Cameron, too. But he says he always suspected ... about Steve and
father, and was only waiting for a chance to be sure of it to make me
... make me marry him."

"By God--"

Conal spun from his chair. His oaths startled the birds from their night
perches under the roof.

"He'll not do that, Deirdre!" he cried. "Not while there's life in me.
Rot him--the crawler! To come here scaring the wits out of you. I'll
screw the last breath out of him, before--"

He made for the door. Deirdre went after him. She put her hand on his
arm.

"You'll do no good now, Conal," she said. "You're done yourself. Rest
till morning. Then you can go to McNab. If he knows there's a man about
to stand by me, p'raps he won't dare to do what he said."

Conal jerked himself away from her.

"No, I'll swear he won't!"

"But you'll do nothing at all if you go now," she urged, "and I'll have
nobody without you. If you'll only rest and sleep now and go in the
morning, it'll be better. You'll be able to put the fear of God into
McNab perhaps if he sees you strong and ready to make him do what you
want."

"Sleep?" He cursed under his breath. "Do you think there's any sleep'll
come to me when I think that McNab--a filthy, damned swine like
McNab--could come near you. I'd kill him--kill him if he touched a hair
of your head."

Her hands fell from him.

Conal's face was distorted with rage. His words brought back memory of
the shot that had almost killed Davey.

Conal guessed what her movement meant.

"Do you still believe"--he lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. "Do
you still believe I fired that shot in the dark, Deirdre?"

"Did you, Conal?" she asked simply.

He turned from her with a gesture of disappointment.

"Oh, it was in anger, and when you weren't sure of what you were doing,
I know," she cried.

He opened the door.

"You're not going to-night?" she asked.

"No. You're right. It'll be better to wait till the morning," he said,
with, for Conal, a strange quietude. "I want to give the mare a rub down
and a feed. Are there any bones for Sally? Throw a shakedown by the fire
for me. I'll be in directly."




CHAPTER XLIV


Conal was early astir. Deirdre heard him moving in the kitchen and then
out of doors.

When he came in again, she had spread a cloth on the end of the table.
Bacon and eggs were spluttering in a shallow pan on the hearth, a pot of
porridge was ready for him, the kettle steaming.

Conal's face was sombre; it was easy to see that he had not slept and
that his mind was set to a plan of action. He ate without speaking, and
got up to go.

Ginger was standing saddled by the door, her reins trailing beside her.
She cropped the young grass that showed vivid green blades about the
water barrel, and was nourished by the drips from the roof spouts and
leakages from the barrel itself. Deirdre heard the click, click of
Ginger's snaffle, the chirping of young birds under the roof, while
Conal was eating. There was a solemnity, a wrapped-up purposefulness
about him this morning; she dared not ask him what he was going to do.

It was a fresh morning with frost in the air. A sparkling rime lay out
on the grass in the paddocks and spread under the straggling shade of
the sheds and the stables in crisp white patches. The sunshine splashed
golden over the hills; it lay in long shafts of purest brilliance on the
paddocks and across the stable yard.

Conal went out of doors; Deirdre followed him.

"Conal," she cried.

There was appeal in her voice.

He had gathered Ginger's reins in his hand. The mare turned her head,
her great beautiful eyes on Deirdre.

"It's no good you're saying anything, Deirdre, telling me what to do and
what not to do," Conal said roughly.

"I've thought it all out. I know what's got to be done. I'll do it the
best way I can."

He understood the prayer of her eyes.

"D'you think I want his blood on my hands?" he asked irritably. "But
he's got to let you go, Deirdre. He's got to. There's no two ways about
it, and if he says a word about the Schoolmaster or Steve, he'll have to
reck'n with me then--and the reckoning'll be a short one. That's the
bargain I'm going to make with him. And I'll hold him responsible ... if
ever the story gets out. He'll pay all the same and I'll swear that--on
the soul of my mother. Do you think my life's worth a straw to me? Do
you think if it is a question of yours and Dan's life against McNab's, I
can hesitate?"

He threw back his head with the old reckless movement.

"Not much! Lord, I'd take what was coming to me, cheerin', if I thought
I'd put things right for the Schoolmaster and you. But if a knocking
about'll do Thad any good instead, he's welcome to it. If I can get what
I want out of him with a scarin' there'll be no need to go further.

"If I promise him on the reddest oath under the sun, and he's pretty
sure I mean it--it'll do instead, perhaps. But I'm not taking any
chances of his trickin' me. I can't afford to take chances, Deirdre. If
I don't feel I've got him that way--"

She knew what he meant.

"It'll be a long day till you're back, Conal," she said.

He swung into his saddle, and went out to the road. She watched the bay
with her long easy stride and Conal swinging above her, till the trees
hid them.

There was no doubt in her mind that when Conal let his tongue loose,
unleashed the rage in him, McNab would do what he wanted. Conal was not
known as "Fighting" Conal for nothing, and he was credited with being a
man of his word. Reckless and dare-devil as he was, none knew better
than McNab that he cared neither for God nor man when his blood was up,
and that he would assuredly do as he said though the heavens fell.

Everybody knew the cringing coward McNab was. More than one of the men
he had sold had threatened to wipe off old scores without leave or
licence. A threat more or less might not have mattered, but each one
intensified McNab's terror of the clutch of iron finger in the night,
the swift blade of a knife, the short bark of a pistol. It was easy to
scare Steve with a clank of a chain, but the click of a pistol behind
McNab turned him livid, a greenish hue spread on his face. Deirdre knew
the frenzy of McNab's fear; but she knew, too, his shrewd brain.

While Conal was there he would dominate, convert him into the shaking,
shrieking thing McNab became when the fear of violence, or a violent
death, took possession of him; but afterwards, when Conal was gone, his
brain would get to work--that cunning brain of his, quickened by a sense
of his injuries and his spluttering, passionate fear and hate of the man
who had humiliated and thwarted him. Deirdre wondered how it would fare
with Conal then, whether McNab would outwit him. He would try. He was
made that way--McNab--to scheme out of holes and corners. If Conal would
have to reckon with him in the end, she realised that it would have been
better to let the reckoning be now, before any further mischief was
done. Yet her mind shuddered at the thought. She knew that she had meant
to delay it.

When Steve came shambling into the yard, blinking at the sunlight, she
told him that Conal had returned and that he had gone down to the Black
Bull, but would be back by the evening.

He exclaimed all the morning about Conal's coming, and had a thousand
questions to ask. Where had Conal been? What had he been doing? Why was
it he had gone off the way he did without saying a word to anybody? All
of which Deirdre had not thought to ask. But they talked about Conal all
the morning. Steve came in from cutting ferns for the cow-shed to ask if
Conal was going to stay long. What was he going to do? Was he going up
to the trial? Had she told him what McNab had said to them?

Deirdre wanted to be very busy all day so that the time would not seem
long till Conal returned.

Steve with his questions made a little current of joyous excitement.
Ordinarily the days were very still and empty. She swept and dusted,
cooked their food, washed the dishes and sewed, with latterly only
anxious thoughts to occupy her mind.

"How is he lookin'--Conal?" Steve asked, coming to the door when she was
beating cream into butter in a delft bowl. He had come in as the idea
for a new question occurred to him.

"Oh, well," she said, "but he'd been riding hard and was tired out. I
think he's a bit thinner than he used to be, and he was awfully hungry."

"You gave him a drop of grog?" he asked, anxiously.

Deirdre nodded.

"He was wet through. I thought he'd have his death of cold to-day."

"But he was all right this morning?"

"Oh, yes."

"Where did he come from?"

She shook her head.

"Hadn't you better finish laying down the ferns," she said. "He may be
back sooner than we think--and then you'll want to talk to him."

"Oh, yes!" He shuffled out of doors again.

A moment later he put his head in the window. His shabby, drooping hat
was outlined against the blank of sunshine. His face looked in at her,
under the shadow of his hat, bright with a question.

"What did he go to the Wirree for, Deirdre?"

"Oh!" She hesitated. "He wanted to see McNab."

"Why?"

Steve chewed the cud of a wondering thought.

"Why did he want to see McNab, Deirdre?"

"He'll tell you when he comes," she said.

The bare kitchen had the musky, warm smell of newly-baked bread and of
curdy, sweet buttermilk by the afternoon. Deirdre had made bread and new
butter for Conal. She had prepared a good meal for him when he came home
in the evening. After she had scrubbed the wooden table until it was of
a weathered whiteness, and redded the bricks round the hearth, she
looked about for other household tasks to work at so that the day would
seem shorter.

It was late in the afternoon when she brushed her hair, twisted it up
anew, put on a fresh frock, and sat down to sew until Conal came. Steve
went out to the road every now and then to see if there were any signs
of him.

Deirdre glanced at the shadows the trees cast. She dared not expect
Conal before sunset. Her needle flew in and out of a piece of stiff
unbleached linen Mrs. Cameron had given her some time ago. She thought
of her when she was afraid to think of Conal and what was happening in
Wirreeford.

The sun sank behind the distant line of hills, and the Jackasses on the
high branches of a tree by the road laughed their good-night to the sun.
She could not restrain her impatience any longer, and went to the road.
Her eyes strained to see Conal and his bay horse, forging out of the
gloom that was beginning to gather amongst the trees, hanging
mysterious, impalpable veils across the ends of the track where the
trees met over it, and it dwindled into a wavering thread.

She lay down by the roadside, and pressed her ear to the earth to listen
for the sound of hoof-beats, but only the forest murmurs came to her,
the moan of the wind in the valleys, the leafy murmur of the trees, the
creaking of broken and swaying branches, the faint calling of birds, all
confused and mingled in a vague wave of sound.

The last hoot hoot of the jackasses in the misty depths of the hills
drifted across the quiet evening air. The cows had gathered against the
paddock fence and were lowing plaintively for the evening milking.

Deirdre drove them into the yard and milked. When she had taken the
pails indoors, she went again to the road, gazed down into the darkness
that had now gathered over the track, and listened for the rapid beat of
hoofs on the road.

A glimmer of light in the shanty windows told Deirdre that Steve had
lighted up. He came to the door.

"Conal's late, Deirdre?" he called.

"Yes," she replied.

She stood there quite still staring down the road.

"What do you think can have kept him?"

Steve had come out and was standing beside her.

Her face was very wan to his old eyes; her dark hair blew in tendrils
about it.

"I--don't know!"

She saw the anxiety start in his eyes.

"Oh, it's all right!" She took his arm and they went towards the house
again.

"He'll be having a game of cards with the boys. It's too soon to expect
him, that's all. We'll go in and have supper."

She spread the table and put out the hot dinner she had made for Conal.
Steve's hunger increased at the savoury smell of it, and because it was
later than they usually had their meal, he ate steadily and with ready
relish. Deirdre sat down at the table with him.

"Aren't you going to have anything?" he asked when he saw that she was
not eating.

"I'll wait for Conal," she said.

Steve dozed in his chair afterwards. The night that closed in on the
forest was of a soft, thick darkness. Deirdre stood in the doorway
looking out into it for while. Not a star hung its silver lamp over the
hills. The wind crept with slow, uncertain breaths about the shanty. She
shut the door.

She carried her work-basket, with the socks that she had been mending
the night before, to the table. But she could not work; her hands would
not stir. She sat listening, listening, listening.

Steve had taken out his pipe and sucked it, nodding in his chair by the
fire. His teeth relaxed their grip as he dozed; the pipe fell on the
floor. Deirdre started to her feet as the sound broke the stillness. It
wakened him too. He stared stupidly about him with sleep-dazed eyes.

"What's that?" he asked. "Has Conal come yet?"

"No," she said, picking up the pipe. "Perhaps you'd better not wait up
for him."

"Yes! Yes!" he muttered testily. "Of course I'll wait."

He sank back into his chair and presently was sleeping again.

Deirdre went back to the table and sat there staring before her,
listening fixedly. Hour after hour went by.

A quick breath crossed her lips; she ran to the door and threw it open.

A gust of wind rushed into the room, and it brought the sound of a horse
on the road. She slammed the door and went back to the hearth, raked the
embers and pulled back the log so that it fell with a shower of sparks
and the flames leapt up over the new wood. She moved the pots with
Conal's dinner in them nearer the fire, and opening the door again,
stood by it waiting.

Ginger swung round the corner, and Conal on her. He was riding low,
huddled against her neck. The way he dropped from the saddle drove the
breath from Deirdre's body.

He threw out his arms and staggered forward. He would have fallen if she
had not been there to hold him. She dragged him indoors leaning against
her.

"Steve--Steve!" she called.

The old man was beside her in an instant.

Conal had fallen, his legs crumpling up under him. There was a stain of
blood on his clothes.

Deirdre tore them from the place where the blood welled. She put the
brandy Steve brought to Conal's lips, and sent Steve for water and rags,
telling him where to find the soft scraps she kept together for burns or
cuts.

"It's like the wound Davey had," Steve cried, when he saw the way the
flesh was ploughed up on Conal's breast, "only nearer the heart."

Conal moaned as the cold water struck him. A damp sweat lay on his
forehead.

"It's all up--I'm done for," he muttered. "Give me--your hand,
Deirdre--never--never thought I'd reach you--but I couldn't
die--there--in the dark--down by the creek."

His voice failed.

"Don't try to talk, Conal dear," she begged. "You'll be all right if you
keep quiet--lie still--Davey was."

But there was a greyness about Conal's face, a dimness that Davey's had
not had.

"Davey?" he muttered. "Davey--"

His eyes opened; they were the wild, bright eyes, reckless and
challenging, of Fighting Conal.

"You--believe--I shot Davey?"

"No." Deirdre bent over him, her breath coming sobbingly. "I don't
believe it now, Conal. The same hands that did this to you--did it to
Davey, too--"

"A damn', whispering slug in the dark!" he gasped. "It was by the
culvert over the creek too--from the cover of the trees--And I know
whose hand it was--I saw the slinking hound. By God--why did I let him
off? Why did I think I'd got him tight enough."

He sank back against her arm with a spasm of pain. She put the spirit to
his lips.

"If only I'd choked--the life out of him, I could die easy. But the mare
bolted--I couldn't get her back to him. The lying cur! The bargain was
made--I thought I'd got him--that he'd 've made over his last penny to
me. Someone kept me talking outside the Bull--it was that kid minds his
horses--saying that Ginger'd gone lame--and the next thing was a shot
from the creek and McNab scuttling among the trees. Paugh!" he moved
impatiently, "Why didn't I do for him while I had the chance."

Superhuman strength animating him for a moment he struggled up, his
swart face stiffening, his eyes flashing.

"I can! I'm alive yet--I can, Deirdre."

He swayed and she caught him, breaking the shock of his fall backwards.
Blood welled from the open wound; the wet pads had staunched the flow
for a moment. Steve brought more water. She dipped fresh linen and rags
in it and bound them into place. Conal lay heavy and still.

She bent over him; her eyes turned questioningly to Steve.

She lifted Conal's head on to her knees. The silence was unbroken.

"Conal," she whispered as though she were calling him, "Conal!"

"That you, Deirdre?" he asked huskily, but he did not open his eyes.
"If--if you could--kiss me--it's so hard to go--feeling you near--and
that you don't care for me at all. If only I hadn't failed you--this
time! If only--But it was because of you I didn't want to--kill
him--unless--unless it was necessary. It seemed all right--the other
way--You won't think badly of me, Deirdre?"

"No, no, Conal dear, but don't try to talk now."

"I've been hard on you--Deirdre--But you won't think ill of me. It's the
way men are made--and I didn't understand how it was with you--and
Davey--not till that night in the hut. If I hadn't brought trouble
between you--you might forgive me."

"Conal, Conal," Deirdre sobbed, the tears streaming over her face.
"You're dear to me, yourself--dear in your own way. Haven't you always
been--and I haven't been good to you--always. My heart's breaking to
hear you talk like this."

She bent over and kissed him.

Conal opened his eyes. The mellow light of serene happiness had drifted
into them. They rested on her face as though they were loath to leave
it. His long fingers were knotted about her hands.

"I'm happier than ever I was in my life, Deirdre, darling," he
whispered. She had to stoop over him to catch the words on his lips, so
faint and hoarsely uttered they were, as though the thoughts left him
without his lips having power to form them. "Never expected to put my
head on your knees--hold your hand--like this. It would never have
happened, if I'd lived, so it's good to die. You'll look after
Ginger--'ginger for pluck'--dear old devil--never 've got here--but for
her. And Sally--good old Sally--not a cattle <DW41>' Like
her--countryside."

The ghost of a smile flitted over his lips.

"If only--"

Recollection of McNab came, banishing the peaceful happiness from his
face. His eyes blazed. There was a momentary struggle for breath and he
fell back fighting for life. Then, on a long sigh, he was still.

Deirdre tried the brandy again. She called him. She felt for his heart.
His head was very heavy on her knees. She stared down on the finely
chiselled features, so still, upraised before her. Her tears rained over
them. The quiet was unbroken but for Steve's crying like a child.

Then Sally, lying crouched against the door of the hut, lifted her voice
in a long, mournful howl that told the shrouded hills and all the
creatures of them that the soul of her master, Long Conal--Conal, the
Fighter--had passed on.




CHAPTER XLV


Deirdre knew that McNab would not come near Steve's while the dead body
of Conal lay there. In the morning, she saddled the chestnut and rode
into Wirreeford.

"It was you shot Conal and I'm going to let all the countryside know
it," she said, facing McNab in the reeking parlour of the Black Bull.

"And who do y' think will believe you?" McNab sidled up to her, his eyes
kindling.

"Everybody who knows you."

"And they'll say to you: 'How do y' know?' 'What proof have you got,
Deirdre?' Nobody'll want to go agen Thad McNab lest they're sure--and
nobody'll want to be gettin' up and givin' evidence against McNab lest
they're sure they're comin' out on the right side of the business."

"Proof? there's proof enough!"

Deirdre's voice rang clear, though her heart was beginning to quail. She
knew that what he said was true. She had come with the idea of using
Conal's death as a weapon against McNab; but it had suddenly become
empty and useless in her hands.

"Now look here, my dear, it's no use bein' nasty," McNab said. "You know
and I know, there's no man in the Wirree would go against me 'less he
was pretty sure of getting somebody stronger than himself to back him.
Well, is he going to get anybody? That's the question."

Deirdre thought of M'Laughlin, sodden with drink, and as much McNab's
creature as any other man in the Wirree.

McNab chuckled, though there was a nervous edge to his voice.

"There's Sergeant M'Laughlin, of course, he's police officer for the
district. You can tell him your story if you like. But he's a
hard-headed man, M'Laughlin. He'll want proofs. And then don't forget
I've still the trump card up me sleeve."

Her immobility maddened him.

"See here, Deirdre," he said, shaking with rage, "I've been patient with
you till now, and I'm not a patient man. Y' may not 've liked the ways
of my love-makin', but they're my ways. Either you take my terms or you
leave them. And if you send any more jackanapes to me y'll find them
served as was Conal.

"Maybe y're waitin' and hopin' young Davey'll come overland," he rasped
on, "to--to help you. Don't let him get in my way again, Deirdre. Don't
let him. If he gets in my way, he'll have to get out of it."

"Or you will have to get out of his way!"

Deirdre's eyes flashed into his. She saw the mean cunning soul in them.
She knew that it would be Davey who would get out, that there was no
fighting McNab. Davey would die as Conal had died, of a shot in the
dark, or a death-dealing stab in the back.

McNab realised that she had measured his chances against Davey Cameron,
Davey's chances against him, in that moment, for all her proud look.

"There's a boat just in the Port--takin' on some cattle--brought news
from Melbourne," he said. "Davey's acquitted. So is the Schoolmaster.
Jury didn't find there was evidence enough to convict. They'll be coming
along by the _Albatross_. She's due in a couple of days. Johnson,
Cameron's man, brought word. If you don't marry me--if y're not Mrs.
McNab before that boat gets in--it can take y'r father and Steve along
with it. It goes right on to Hobart Town after calling here."

Deirdre stumbled out of the room. McNab did not follow her. He knew that
she would not fight any more.

He watched her swing into her saddle and ride out along the flat,
dun- road to the hills. Mrs. Mary Ann, driving a string of
snow-white geese along the green ledges of the wayside, called to her,
but Deirdre fled on, past the cottage that the Schoolmaster and she had
lived in, past the out-croppings of gorse beginning to bud goldenly on
the edge of the plains.

And McNab chuckled softly, rubbing his hands together.




CHAPTER XLVI


The _Albatross_ was in.

Just before midday, carts and carry-alls had clattered along the road to
the Port. Deirdre, riding down from the hills at dawn, had seen the
schooner on the dim shining screen of sea and sky. There was no wind,
and like a great white bird she hovered outside the bar, waiting for the
wind and tide to carry her into the quiet waters of the inlet.

It was not until midday that a breeze sprang up, sending white, curled
breakers high over the bar, and the _Albatross_ on the crest of them
came sailing into the harbour. She rode, furling her sails, to the
log-wood wharf on its further side. A crowd had gathered to meet her,
and it was early afternoon before the vehicles began to rattle back
along the road to the hills and Wirreeford. Deirdre stood at the window
of McNab's parlour, behind the curtains that had been hung up in her
honour, watching them.

She saw none of the curious looks and gestures that went her way, the
pitiful glances that covered her. For the news of the Port that morning
beat any the boat had brought. Those who saw the dim white face of the
girl at the window, and her shadowy eyes, knew that she was Thad McNab's
wife. They knew that McNab had driven Deirdre Farrel into the Port
before any of them were astir and that a clergyman had married them in
the church there.

"Why did she do it? What could have made her," they asked each other.

"It wasn't for love of his beautiful face, be sure," snarled Salt
Watson.

"It's hard on the Schoolmaster. He'll not know of it yet," somebody else
said.

Deirdre neither heard nor saw them. She was watching for Davey and Dan
to pass. She had seen Mrs. Ross and Jessie go by to the Port in
Cameron's double-seated buggy. She thought they would ride together to
the hills in that, Davey and her father.

If they knew, they would stop at the Black Bull; if no one had told them
they would go on, she had decided. They would wonder why she was not on
the wharf when the boat got in, to meet them. But McNab would not have
that. He would not lose sight of her. Besides she did not want to meet
the eyes of the men and women who would be there, and hear what they had
to say.

She was cut off from the world as she stood at the window of McNab's
house. Her mind was too utterly weary to reason further. As she watched
and waited a sense of bleak desolation closed in on her. Her eyes ached
for sight of the Schoolmaster's form against the clear sky, although she
knew she would hardly see it above the buggy and among other people.

She asked herself what he would do when he found that she was not
waiting for him at Steve's--what he would think when he found the letter
that was lying for him there.

Steve would have to read it for him. It would break his heart, the
letter that she had wept and prayed over; but it was better that his
heart should break than that he should go to the Island again. And
Steve, poor old Steve, would die in peace some day and be put to rest
where they had put Conal. A magistrate--assisted in a fashion by
M'Laughlin and a jury--had duly investigated and found that his tragic
death was an impenetrable mystery. An "open verdict," they called the
finding.

Conal's resting place was on a sunny hillside under a blossoming white
gum in which the bees hummed drowsily in the spring time and through
which the green parrots flashed all the year. It was good to think that
Steve would draw his last breath in freedom, and then sleep there under
the blue sky. But for her, there would be no freedom, no open spaces.
Life had become a prison from which there was only one gate--Death; and
that she would not be able to open because she was a hostage for other
lives. Dan's, and Steve's--perhaps Davey's.

Cameron's buggy rounded a turn in the road.

Mrs. Ross and Jessie were in it, and there was a man's figure beside
theirs--only one though.

The horse, moving at her slow, steady jog-trot, drew nearer.

Deirdre saw clearly the man who was driving. It was Davey. The
Schoolmaster was not with him.

A panic seized her. She flew out to the road, the horse stopped
automatically.

"Where's father?" she cried.

Davey stared at her. He scarcely knew her--this wild, white-faced
creature with burning eyes and colourless lips.

"Hasn't he come?" she asked.

"No," he said slowly.

He got down from the buggy. His heart ached at the sight of her. He
hardly knew how to speak. He moved to take her hands.

She shrank from him.

"Why didn't he come?"

"Because ... Oh, Deirdre, it breaks my heart to tell you," he broke out.
"Don't look at me like that. I did all I could, but it was no good. Some
cursed brute gave information--"

"Oh," she whispered. "It was that then!"

And after a moment:

"They took him again--for being at large before the expiration of ...
sentence!"

"Yes."

His eyes were all tenderness and pity for her.

"When, Davey?"

"Just before we were leaving, four days ago. Don't look like that,
Deirdre! I won't leave a stone unturned to get him back. And I promised
him that we--"

She laughed, a strange, cracking little laugh.

"Deirdre!"

He was perplexed and hurt.

"Don't come near me!"

She turned away from him and ran into the house under the swinging sign
of the black bull with red-rimmed eyes.

Davey attempted to follow her. He saw McNab in the doorway.

"What the hell's she doing there?" he muttered.

Mrs. Ross and Jessie eyed each other anxiously. They did not speak for a
minute. Then the elder woman said nervously, uncertainly:

"P'raps ... p'raps she came down with Steve to meet the Schoolmaster.
But we'd better be going on, Davey. Don't risk any trouble with Thad
McNab to-day. Your mother's waiting eagerly for you. You're her only
thought now. All she has got."

Davey climbed into the buggy again. His face was sombre. He had not got
over the shock of his father's death and Deirdre's manner wounded and
bewildered him. He thought that she was distraught with agony and
disappointment on the Schoolmaster's account. He had imagined how
tenderly he would tell her what had happened, and comfort her. Now to
find her at the Black Bull, not at Steve's, where he had thought she
would be, and Mrs. Ross and Jessie beside him, when he wanted to fold
her in his arms and assure her that he would never rest until Dan was
with them again! He swore at every jolt and jar on the road to relieve
his impatience.

It was Mrs. Ross who said to Mary Cameron, taking her aside when mother
and son had met, and Davey was turning Bess into the paddock again:

"It's true what we heard about Deirdre Farrel going to marry McNab. She
was married to him this morning. You'd better break the news to Davey.
He doesn't know yet. I dursn't tell him for fear he'd go to McNab. I
wanted to bring him safe to you. Jessie and I'll go home now. No doubt
you'll like to have the house to yourself, but if you want anything, or
there's anything we can do for you--"

"We're always glad to do anything for you, Mrs. Cameron, dear," Jessie
said softly.

"It's a queer, heartless girl Deirdre is, to play fast and loose with
the love of a fine fellow like Davey," Mrs. Ross said, when Jess was
outside setting their bundles and baskets into the cart.

"Oh, she wouldn't do that--Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron replied. "It's
something dreadful that's driven her to it."

"Yes--I suppose it is," Mrs. Ross sighed. "Poor child. Perhaps I'm
spiteful about it, Mary. But maybe now that she is out of the way, Davey
may think of my Jessie again."

Davey' s mother smiled sadly.

"I'd be sorry for any woman he married but Deirdre, for she has the
whole of him--heart and soul," she said.

"Oh well, it's a pity!" Mrs. Ross kissed her good-bye. "Jess had better
make up her mind to have Buddy Morrison, then, and that's what I've been
telling her this long time. He's a good lad, very fond of her, and been
wanting to marry her for the last five years."

When Jess and her mother had gone, driving off in their high, jolting
buggy, Davey and Mrs. Cameron went indoors together.

He had aged considerable since she last saw him. It was a stern, strange
face to her, this her boy's. There were sorrow, self-repression, a
bitter realisation of life and what it means in heartache and
disappointment, in his expression; something of power and assurance too.

She was wondering how she could tell him, covering him with tender,
pitiful glances, and praying that he would not leave her, that no hurt
might come to him, when he asked suddenly:

"Have you seen anything of Deirdre, mother?"

He had been moving restlessly about the room, lifting things from their
place on the mantelpiece and putting them back again.

She called him to her and, putting her hands on his head, told him what
Mrs. Ross had said.

Davey's face hardened and whitened slowly. He put her hands away from
him and wheeled unsteadily from the room. She heard him go across the
yard, and saw him stumbling up the narrow track to the trees on the far
side of the hill.




CHAPTER XLVII


Mrs. Cameron was feeding her chickens when she thought she heard someone
calling. She listened, and decided that it was only a whispering of wind
in the trees that had caught her ear.

The mild light of the evening lingered about her. Her eyes lay on the
hill that rose with a gentle <DW72> beyond the yard, the barns and
stable, and a score of low-built brushwood sheds. Mists were beginning
to gather among the trees that fringed the top on either side. Davey had
gone up among those trees.

The sound of her name called faintly again disturbed her. She looked
down towards the road that wound uphill out of the forest. It was
wraith-like in the twilight, the long white gate that barred it from the
paddock about the house, growing dim. The gum saplings of two or three
years' growth, with their powdery-grey leaves pressing on the far side
of the fence behind the barn, shivered as the surface of still water
shivers when something stirs beneath it. Her eyes were directed towards
the centre of the almost imperceptible movement.

Someone called her, faintly, whisperingly.

Going towards the fence, she saw a wan face and wide eyes among the
leaves. The lines of a long, dark dress went off into the shadows among
the trees.

"Deirdre," she cried.

The girl came towards her. Her dress was draggled and torn. There was a
red line on her cheek where a broken branch had caught and scratched it.

"Where's Davey?" she asked.

"Deirdre, what has happened?" Mrs. Cameron recognised a tragic urgency
in her face. "Come in, you're exhausted. You don't mean to say you've
walked from the Wirree."

She took her hand and led her into the kitchen. The fire was sending
long ruddy beams of light over the bricked floor, glimmering on the rows
of polished metal covers on the walls, and the crockery on the wooden
dresser at the far end of the room. It was very homely and peaceful,
Mrs. Cameron's kitchen. She pushed Deirdre gently into the big arm-chair
by the fire.

"Sit there, dearie, till I get you a hot drink," she said.

Deirdre sat very still, gazing before her.

"It's this marriage with McNab is too much for her," Mrs. Cameron
thought.

"Oh, child, why did you do it? What could have driven you to it?" she
asked.

The shadow of a slow and subtle smile crept for a moment about Deirdre's
lips and vanished again.

"If only you'd have told me your trouble," Mrs. Cameron cried. "I might
have been able to help you."

"Oh no, you wouldn't," Deirdre said.

"You couldn't have married McNab for any reason of choice." Mrs. Cameron
was torn between grief, bewilderment and compassion. "Davey is breaking
his heart about it, out on the hills somewhere, now. I had to tell him
when he came in, for fear--What's to be done about it, Deirdre? Oh, I'm
not wanting to blame you. You did it for a good reason, I'm sure, and
you love Davey. It's hard on you, Deirdre. You do love him?"

"Yes," Deirdre said slowly.

Mrs. Cameron knelt beside the chair. Her hands trembled on the girl's
arm.

"Don't touch me," Deirdre gasped, moving out of the reach of her hands.
"Don't touch me," she whispered again, eyeing her strangely.

"Davey--I'm afraid what he'll do if he sees you...." Mrs. Cameron
hesitated.

Deirdre sprang out of the chair, her eyes blazing.

"Davey! Davey! It's all Davey with you!" she cried. "You sacrificed
father to him. You sent him to that trial. I know now. And Davey--why
couldn't he have gone to gaol instead? He's young and strong and it
wouldn't have mattered so much to him. He's got all his life before him.
But father--hadn't he done enough for you? Hasn't he given his eyes for
you? Hasn't he worshipped you all these years? I've seen it since I was
a child. And is this all you could do for him, send him to the Law
Courts to get Davey off, knowing that it would be worse than death to
him to have to go to prison again? Oh, you knew what he'd have to suffer
in Davey's place...."

Mrs. Cameron put her hands over her face.

"You knew he couldn't afford to come under the notice of the law,"
Deirdre said. "But I shouldn't talk like this--"

Her voice trailed wearily.

"Only--I had to choose between father and Davey. McNab knows all the old
story. You do, I know. Steve told me. McNab scared the wits out of Steve
one day when he was by himself and got all the proofs he wanted, though
he seems to have had the facts--most of them, anyway--before. Then he
told me--what being at large before the expiration of sentence meant,
and what his information would do if he used it, about father, when the
trial was on. He said that he wouldn't use it if I'd marry him."

Mrs. Cameron stared at her.

Deirdre went on, her voice dragging as if she could scarcely put into
words the pain and trouble of her mind.

"I couldn't let father suffer any more. I couldn't bear to think what it
would be for him to go back there, to the Island," she said. "He, blind
... and loving me so ... and you--and both of us willing to sacrifice
him to Davey. I could see him going over there, hurt and alone, in the
dark, the dear, great, gentle heart of him crying ... crying for those
he loved to be near him, to hear the sound of their voices, to touch
their hands. I couldn't endure it. Oh, I couldn't."

Her head dropped.

"He has made sacrifices all his life. His eyes for you--"

"Don't say that, Deirdre!"

"It's the truth," the girl said fiercely. "That night of the fixes he
saw the branch falling. It would have hit you if he had not put up his
arm, and it came down on him--on his face--all the red-hot embers...."

Mrs. Cameron uttered a low cry.

"And now at the end of his days you took this last scrap of freedom from
him. But I wouldn't have it. I knew that the time had come for somebody
to do something for him."

There was a few moments' silence.

"Only after all"--a weary bitterness surged in her voice--"it was no
good. McNab was too clever for me. He trapped me--and sold father all
the same--and Steve, poor old Stevie, too. M'Laughlin took him down to
the Port this afternoon. I heard him crying like a baby. When I asked
McNab why he had broken his word to me, he said"--a little sick laughter
struggled from her--"that, blind as father was, he knew he'd have to
reckon with him for having taken me, if he ever came back to the
Wirree."

She sank back in the chair, shivering and sobbing.

Mrs. Cameron leant towards her.

"Don't touch me!" Deirdre shrank from her. "I haven't told you all yet.
McNab locked me in a room when he knew that I knew what he'd done. It
was when he came to me there and called me his wife--I killed him."

Mrs. Cameron fell back from her.

"Oh, I didn't mean to kill him," the girl cried distractedly. "He came
near me. I told him not to, but he did. He talked of his rights. I hit
at him ... to keep him away from me ... with something that was lying on
the table. I don't know what it was, but it was heavy--and he fell down.

"I knew he was dead by the way he lay there, without moving--and then I
ran out of the room and came here. Oh, I didn't mean to do it--but I'm
not sorry it's done--that he is dead and can do no more harm to any of
us. He killed Conal. And it was he that shot at Davey. He would have
again, too. He was afraid of Davey--what he would do ... when he found
out about father and me."

She was sobbing breathlessly; her hands went out before her with a
desperate, despairing gesture. She moved towards the door.

"Where are you going? What are you going to do, Deirdre?"

Mrs. Cameron followed her.

"I don't know!" The girl stood quivering by the doorpost. "Only I must
go. They may come from the Wirree and find me here. And I don't want to
be hanged--that's what they do with people who have done what I've done,
isn't it? I want to go. Davey mustn't see me. It's no good. No good!
There would be the great gulf between us always ... and as long as I
lived--to the day of my death--I'd be on the other side of it, with my
arms out to him. Oh, you mustn't keep me. Can't you see it's best that I
should go ... now ... like this, before...."

"You're not thinking of doing any harm to yourself, Deirdre?"

The anguished eyes of the woman beside her reached the girl through the
maze and terror of her thoughts. They calmed the tumult within her.

"The Long Gully," she said simply, wearily, "the mists are so deep in it
to-night, and there would be no waking in the morning."

Mrs. Cameron took her hand.

"You say I've never done anything for your father, Deirdre. I want to do
something for him now. Come back and listen to me for a moment."

She led the girl back to the chair, and forced her into it.

"But they'll be coming for me soon," Deirdre cried fretfully, looking
back at the door.

She hardly heard what Mrs. Cameron was saying for awhile. Her tired,
bright eyes wandered restlessly up and down the room. The pain in her
head prevented her thinking.

"Deirdre darling," Mrs. Cameron said, her voice trembling, "there's not
a man or woman in the country would not say you were justified. And no
woman is better able to understand than I am. I'm not afraid for you ...
and there's no one I'd rather have for Davey's wife than you. You were
willing to sacrifice yourself. But when treachery had been proved
against you, there was that within you would not let evil come near
you."

"Do you mean ... you'd be satisfied for Davey to have me!" Deirdre
asked.

"Yes."

Mrs. Cameron's eyes were on hers.

"You'd not be throwing it up at me that I ... that I did this?" Deirdre
inquired. "And that father--"

"No." Mrs. Cameron's voice was very low. "Because if I had been served
as your father was--I'd have been a convict too."

In the shock of what she had said, Deirdre forgot her own trouble.

"You?" she whispered.

"That's what I wanted to tell you ... it's been locked in my heart so
long ... and nobody else knows," Mrs. Cameron said. "It's because I
think it may help you, Deirdre, now that your soul is in the deep
waters, I want you to know ... that something like what has happened to
you happened to me, long ago. Only I had less excuse."

Her face was torn with grief; she turned from the girl, overwhelmed by
the flood-tide of dark memories.

"Oh, I can't think of it without all the agony again," she cried.

And after a moment, continued:

"I didn't want to bring shame on my people by having it known ... I had
been the cause of death to a man ... but the weight was on my soul, I
had heard of people escaping public trial by condemning themselves to
transportation. It was the only way I could have any peace of mind, I
thought--taking on myself the punishment other women had got for doing
what I did. But it was never as bad for me as for them. Davey's father
saw me on the wharf among the emigrant women, and he wanted to marry me.
There was a Government bounty--thirty pounds I think it was--given to
married couples coming to the colony, and he wanted the money to begin
with in the new country. I told him why I was going out, and he was
willing to take me. There were terrible days of fear among all the rough
people I found myself with ... till he came. I was grateful to him, and
swore to be a good and faithful wife to him.

"I've not spoken of this since then, Deirdre. I'm telling you because I
want you not to throw your life away--not to waste it. I know I was
wrong. There was this difference between what you did and what I did. I
was not in a corner, fighting for my life as you were. I did not mean to
take life. I did not mean to. It was an accident, really. Right was on
my side, but I was angry, or the accident would never have happened. I
have suffered from knowing that. All these years have made little
difference. That's why I was always wanting to help convicts and
prisoners in the old days--and it angered Davey's father so. I felt that
they were suffering what I ought to have been suffering too....

"But with you it was different. Your own instinct tells you the
difference. It does not accuse you. No one else will, either. And
there's your father to think of. It would take the last gleam of
happiness from him to know you had ended your own life, Deirdre. And
there's Davey and me to love you and care for you, always."

Deirdre stared at her; then the tears came; she cried quietly.

Mrs. Cameron put her arms round her. She comforted her with tender
little murmurings. Deirdre raised her head, and put her off from her,
gazing into her face with drenched eyes.

"I understand ever so much better now," she said. And a moment later:
"Have I been mad with fright? What'll I do? My head aches so, I scarcely
know what I am saying. I can't think. What shall I do? What is going to
happen to me?"

"There's no jury in the country that would not acquit you," Mrs. Cameron
said. "McNab was well known. Oh, people were afraid of him, but they
will speak now. You're young and beautiful, and if your story is not a
justification--there's no God watching over the world."

"But what will Davey think of me?" Deirdre cried. "I'm afraid to see
him--I wanted to, when I came here--but I'm afraid now. I thought it
would be to say good-bye. They'll be coming for me soon, too. Oh, I'll
go now, Mrs. Cameron. If Davey looked at my hands, and knew what they
had done--"

Conflicting thoughts, whipping each other, were driving her like a leaf,
first one way and then the other.

There was a heavy step on the threshold. Davey's figure loomed against
the doorway.

Coming in from the light, it was a few minutes before his eyes
accustomed to the gloom, saw that there was someone with his mother.

He stared at Deirdre as though they were ghosts who were meeting after
death, beyond the world. She shrank from the stare of his eyes, putting
up her arms to hide her face, with a little pitiful cry. She moved along
the wall towards the door as if to go out and escape them.

"Davey! Davey! Don't let her go," Mrs. Cameron cried. Although his eyes
followed her, and he seemed to guess her intention, he did not stir.

"Davey," Mrs. Cameron cried, a pang in her heart like the blade of a
knife. "She has killed McNab, and is going to her death because of it."

Deirdre stood still. Her arms dropped from her face. She threw back her
head, her eyes met his unflinchingly.

"You--you have killed him?"

His voice was harsh with the effort to speak.

"Yes," she said.

A gust of passion rushed over him. It flooded him with a vigour, and
exultation that transformed him.

He strode towards her. His arms imprisoned her. He held her, and kissed
her with the hungry kiss of a lover, long denied.

"Deirdre, Deirdre!" he sobbed. "That you should have--It was for me to
do--that. I meant to, to-night. Do you think I could have lived ...
breathed ... been sane, while you ... were near him?"

He crushed her in his arms again. They sobbed together childishly.

Mrs. Cameron went into the other room--her sitting-room with its shiny
black horse-hair furniture, and the cupboard in which her spinning wheel
had stood since the days of Donald Cameron's greatness. The beloved blue
vase that she had saved from the fire was still on the chiffonier. She
sat in the room she had been so proud of, a long time, her hands clasped
in her lap, reviewing her memories.

They came in straggling lines and phalanxes--memories of her youth, of
an old sad time, of her voyage across the seas beside Donald Cameron, of
their journey into the hills, of the days of struggle and toil and
domestic tranquility that had given her a son, of her first fear and
loneliness in the silent world of the trees, and of the gaunt men who
had come to her out of them.

The complexities of human emotion were a mystery and a distress to her.
She had the momentary vision of a prison yard, its grim walls, trains of
sullen men in grimy grey and yellow clothes, all of the same pattern,
and of one who walked among them, wearily, a little uncertainly, singing
faintly, as she had often heard him singing on the hill roads. Her eyes
went down the <DW72> of the hill to the spot under the light-leafed trees
where Donald Cameron had been laid to rest, her heart crying an
assurance of loyalty and fidelity to the yoke mate. They had set a seed
in the country that would bear fruit in the union of the two in the next
room, she knew. All the labour of their pioneering had not been in vain.
Donald Cameron had done what he set out to do, though his last days had
been darkened with disappointment, the bitter sense of disgrace and the
futility of all his long years of toil. But his name would go on, she
realised, and his children's children would talk with pride of their
grandfather who had come from the old country, a poor man, and had made
a great name for himself in the new land. Of the spiritual undertow
which bound Deirdre and Davey, she could not think. That was entwined
with the subtle, inexplicable currents of her own soul. She had turned
her face from them, shut her eyes and ears to the sight and sound of
them. She had never allowed herself to recognise their existence even;
yet she knew that they were there, rushing on, silently, irresistibly
into eternity.

A vision of the prison yard came again, shaping itself slowly, vaguely,
and with it a sound of chains, the harsh voices of warders and gaolers.
Her thoughts went back to the lovers in the other room.

She folded her hands with a little passionate gesture; the light of her
whole soul shone in her eyes.

"Oh God," she whispered breathlessly, "we broke the earth, we sowed the
seed. Let theirs be the harvest--the joy of life and the fullness
thereof."




CHAPTER XLVIII


Fifteen Years After

A boy pushed the bracken and ferny grey and green wattle sprays from
before a lichen-grown wooden cross. He was a sturdy youngster, with an
eager, sensitive face, and dropped on one knee beside the mound the
parted ferns and branches revealed, to read the inscription on the
cross.

The path that wound uphill through the trees behind him was an old one,
overgrown with mosses. Scraps of bark and sear leaves were matted across
it. The weathered, rambling homestead of Ayrmuir was just visible
through the trees, and a cornfield waving down the <DW72> of the hill
showed golden through a gap in the waving leafage. Donald Cameron had
marked the place long before, and said that there, where the wagon had
come to a standstill, he must be laid to rest. And it was within memory
of the boy that his grandmother, Mary Cameron, had been laid beside him.

A voice floating down the hillside from the house called:

"Dan! Dan!"

Deirdre came down the path towards him, an older, graver Deirdre, with
peace in her deep-welled eyes, though an undefinable shadow rested on
her face.

"Here you are, dear!" she said. "It'll be time to be getting ready soon.
Mick has the horses in--and your father won't like to be kept waiting.
There was so much I wanted to say to you, too, before you go up to this
big school. It won't be a bit like going to the school down here or
doing Latin with me--going to the Grammar School, Dan."

"No, of course, mother."

"I wonder sometimes if I've been wrong to keep you so much with me," she
said wistfully. "You had to be told all the terrible old story. I told
you myself, because I wanted you to understand."

"Mother!" There were reverence and adoration in his eyes as they rested
on her.

"You're sure--sure, you don't feel strange about your mother, Dan?" she
asked. "A jury acquitted me, but I know I was right myself. There was
nothing else to do."

She was quivering to the shock of startled memories.

"I can't feel that I could have done anything else than I did," she
cried passionately, "but I can't forget, Dan. The horror of it all
shadows me still--it always will."

The boy slipped his arms through hers and pressed against her.

"Whenever I read in history or a story of people who had to do terrible
things for those they loved, I think: 'Like my mother!' But no one I've
ever read, or heard of, was like you," he said shyly.

"Dan!"

A smile of melting, eager tenderness suffused her eyes.

As they turned away he looked back at the grave under the trees.

"I thought I'd like to say good-bye to them," he said. "They were
pioneers, weren't they, grandfather and grandmother? Makes me feel like
being a bit of history myself, to think that my grandfather and
grandmother were pioneers. I was saying to myself just now: 'They did so
much against such big odds, what a lot I ought to be able to do with
everything made easy for me."

"I wish your father and mother were down here, too," he added.

"I never knew my mother, Dan," Deirdre said dreamily. "You know, I've
told you all about that. She died when I was born--and it was because I
was such a wailing baby, that my father called me Deirdre--Deirdre of
the griefs. And he--lies over there in the Island."

"I remember him," the boy said eagerly, his voice hushed. "When I was a
little kid, we went, you, and I, and father, to see him, didn't we? And
I sort of remember a tall, thin man who had white hair--quite white
hair, and was blind; he was always singing, so as you could scarcely
hear him, and once he said suddenly when I was on his knee, don't you
remember: 'He's got her eyes, Deirdre?'"

"Yes." Deirdre murmured, the pain in her eyes deepening.

"I've wondered ... I've often wondered what he meant, mother. How could
he know what my eyes were like. He was blind."

"He meant your grandmother--Mary Cameron, Dan. He used to say she had
twilight eyes; and that the light of them pierced his darkness," Deirdre
said.

The boy puzzled over that.

"I remember, she said to me once," he said, thoughtfully. "'You ought to
be a great man, Dan, because four great nations have gone to the making
of you.' I didn't know what she meant at first. Then she told me that my
four grandparents were English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. 'They have
quarrelled and fought among themselves, but you are a gathering of them
in a new country, Dan,' she said. 'There will be a great future for the
nation that comes of you and the boys and girls like you. It will be a
nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men
and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness. You belong
to the hunted too, and suffering has taught you.'

"Then she told me about prisons here in the early days, mother, and
terrible stories of how people lived in the old country. 'They may talk
about your birthstain by and by, Dan,' she said, 'but that will not
trouble you, because it was not this country made the stain. This
country has been the redeemer and blotted out all those old stains.'"

Deirdre gazing into the eager, wistful face of her son realised that he
was unfolding a dream to her. She smiled into his eyes and he back to
her with a consciousness of the serene understanding and sympathy
between them.

"'You will be a pioneer too, Dan,' grandmother said," the boy continued
with a shy reverence, "'a pioneer of paths that will make the world a
better, happier place for everybody to live in. You will, because you
won't be able to help it. There's the blood of pioneers in you.'"



***