"Well--let Ross look after his own," snarled the father.

"But he can't, father. They're fighting the fire now, and they'll be burnt out before the morning if they don't get help--for G.o.d's sake, father, act like a Christian and send the men. Remember it is Christmas-time, father. You're surely not going to see a neighbour burnt out."

"Yes, I am," shouted Wall. "I'd like to see every selector in the country burnt out, hut and all! Get off that horse and go inside. If a man leaves the station to-night he needn't come back." (This last for the benefit of the men's hut.)

"But, father--"

"Get off that horse and go inside," roared Wall.

"I--I won't."

"What!" He darted forward as though to drag her from the saddle, but she swung her horse away.

"Stop! Where are you going?"

"To help Ross," said Mary. "He had no one to send for help."

"Then go the same way as your brother!" roared her father; "and if you show your nose back again I'll horse-whip you off the run!"

"I'll go, father," said Mary, and she was away.

IV

THE FIRE AT ROSS'S FARM

Ross's farm was in a corner between the ridges and the creek. The fire had come down from the creek, but the siding on that side was fairly clear, and they had stopped the fire there. It went behind the ridge and ran up and over. The ridge was covered thickly with scrub and dead gra.s.s; the wheat-field went well up the siding, and along the top was a bush face with only a narrow bridle-track between it and the long dead gra.s.s. Everything depended on the wind. Mary saw Ross and Mrs Ross and the daughter Jenny, well up the siding above the fence, working desperately, running to and fro, and beating out the fire with green boughs. Mary left her horse, ran into the hut, and looked hurriedly round for something to wear in place of her riding-skirt. She only saw a couple of light print dresses. She stepped into a skillion room, which happened to be Bob's room, and there caught sight of a pair of trousers and a coat hanging on the wall.

Bob Ross, beating desperately along a line of fire that curved down-hill to his right, and half-choked and blinded with the smoke, almost stumbled against a figure which was too tall to be his father.

"Why! who's that?" he gasped.

"It's only me, Bob," said Mary, and she lifted her bough again.

Bob stared. He was so astonished that he almost forgot the fire and the wheat. Bob was not thin--but--

"Don't look at me, Bob!" said Mary, hurriedly. "We're going to be married, so it doesn't matter. Let us save the wheat."

There was no time to waste; there was a breeze now from over the ridges, light, but enough to bear the fire down on them. Once, when they had breathing s.p.a.ce, Mary ran to the creek for a billy of water. They beat out the fire all along the siding to where a rib of granite came down over the ridge to the fence, and then they thought the wheat was safe.

They came together here, and Ross had time to look and see who the strange man was; then he stared at Mary from under his black, bushy eyebrows. Mary, choking and getting her breath after her exertions, suddenly became aware, said "Oh!" and fled round the track beyond the point of granite. She felt a gust of wind and looked up the ridge. The bush fence ended here in a corner, where it was met by a new wire fence running up from the creek. It was a blind gully full of tall dead gra.s.s, and, glancing up, Mary saw the flames coming down fast. She ran back.

"Come on!" she cried, "come on! The fire's the other side of the rocks!"

Back at the station, Wall walked up and down till he cooled. He went inside and sat down, but it was no use. He lifted his head and saw his dead wife's portrait on the wall. Perhaps his whole life ran before him in detail--but this is not a psychological study.

There were only two tracks open to him now: either to give in, or go on as he was going--to shut himself out from human nature and become known as "Mean Wall," "Hungry Wall," or "Mad Wall, the Squatter." He was a tall, dark man of strong imagination and more than ordinary intelligence. And it was the great crisis of his ruined life. He walked to the top of a knoll near the homestead and saw the fire on the ridges above Ross's farm. As he turned back he saw a horseman ride up and dismount by the yard.

"Is that you, Peter?"

"Yes, boss. The fences is all right."

"Been near Ross's?"

"No. He's burnt out by this time."

Wall walked to and fro for a few minutes longer. Then he suddenly stopped and called, "Peter!"

"Ay, ay!" from the direction of the huts.

"Turn out the men!" and Wall went into a shed and came out with his saddle on his arm.

The fire rushed down the blind gully. Showers of sparks fell on the bush fence, it caught twice, and they put it out, but the third time it blazed and roared and a fire-engine could not have stopped it.

"The wheat must go," said Ross. "We've done our best," and he threw down the blackened bough and leaned against a tree, and covered his eyes with a grimy hand.

The wheat was patchy in that corner--there were many old stumps of trees, and there were bare strips where the plough had gone on each side of them. Mary saw a chance, and climbed the fence.

"Come on, Bob," she cried, "we might save it ye. Mr Ross, pull out the fence along there," and she indicated a point beyond the fire. They tramped down and tore up the wheat where it ran between the stumps--the fire was hissing and crackling round and through it, and just as it ran past them in one place there was a shout, a clatter of horses' hoofs on the stones, and Mary saw her father riding up the track with a dozen men behind him. She gave a shriek and ran straight down, through the middle of the wheat, towards the hut.

Wall and his men jumped to the ground, wrenched green boughs from the saplings, and, after twenty minutes' hard fighting, the crop was saved--save for a patchy acre or so. When it was all over Ross sat down on a log and rested his head on his hands, and his shoulders shook.

Presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Wall.

"Shake hands, Ross," he said.

And it was Christmas Day.

But in after years they used to nearly chaff the life out of Mary. "You were in a great hurry to put on the breeches, weren't you, Mary?" "Bob's best Sunday-go-meetin's, too, wasn't they, Mary?" "Rather tight fit, wasn't they, Mary?" "Couldn't get 'em on now, could you, Mary?"

"But," reflected old Peter apart to some cronies, "it ain't every young chap as gits an idea of the shape of his wife afore he marries her--is it? An' that's sayin' somethin'."

And old Peter was set down as being an innercent sort of ole cove.

THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT

There had been heavy rain and landslips all along the branch railway which left the Great Western Line from Sydney just beyond the Blue Mountains, and ran through thick bush and scrubby ridgy country and along great alluvial sidings--were the hills on the opposite side of the wide valleys (misty in depths) faded from deep blue into the pale azure of the sky--and over the ends of western spurs to the little farming, mining and pastoral town of Solong, situated in a circle of blue hills on the banks of the willow-fringed Cudgegong River.

The line was hopelessly blocked, and some publicans at Solong had put on the old coach-road a couple of buggies, a wagonette, and an old mail coach--relic of the days of Cobb & Co., which had been resurrected from some backyard and tinkered up--to bring the train pa.s.sengers on from the first break in the line over the remaining distance of forty miles or so. Capertee Station (old time, "Capertee Camp"--a teamster's camp) was the last station before the first washout, and there the railway line and the old road parted company for the last time before reaching Solong--the one to run round by the ends of the western spurs that spread fanlike, and the other to go through and over, the rough country.

The train reached Capertee about midnight in broad moonlight that was misty in the valleys and round the blue of Crown Ridge. I got a "box-seat" beside the driver on the old coach. It was a grand old road--one of the old main coach-roads of New South Wales--broad and white, metalled nearly all the way, and in nearly as good condition as on the day when the first pa.s.senger train ran into Solong and the last-used section of the old road was abandoned. It dated back to the bushranging days--right back to convict times: it ran through tall dark bush, up over gaps or "saddles" in high ridges, down across deep dark gullies, and here and there across grey, marshy, curlew-haunted flats.

Cobb & Co's coach-and-six, with "Royal Mail" gilded on the panels, had dashed over it in ten and twelve-mile stages in the old days, the three head-lamps flashing on the wild dark bush at night, and maybe twenty-four pa.s.sengers on board. The biggest rushes to richest goldfields in the west had gone over this old road on coaches, on carts, on drays, on horse and bullock wagons, on horseback, and on foot; new chums from all the world and from all stations in life.