He tried to shout a warning, and to call for help, but it was as if his voice had dried up in his throat.

No one else appeared aware of the danger. The place seemed solitary and silent, save for the hiss and crackle of the fire.

Then he heard a cry for help. It came from the inside of the shed, and dashing forward, regardless of his own danger, he groped his way in through smoke and flame, then, seizing the sick man, turned to carry him out to safety, but even in that moment was stricken to the ground with the burden he bore, and pinned there by a fall of roofing.

CHAPTER XVIII

"Father, We Want You!"

Rupert was so much better when he woke from his long sleep that the doctor told Nealie she might be quite easy to leave him to the care of Sylvia on the following day and go in search of her father if she wished.

"You will be able to look after him too, will you not?" asked Nealie wistfully, for in her heart she rather doubted Sylvia's nursing skill.

"No, I am coming with you," he answered, looking at her with a smile.

Nealie flushed hotly and burst into vigorous protest. "Please, please do not take so much trouble for me; and besides, think of your patients, and what you may lose by being away."

He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "Doctors have very hard times in the back blocks, Miss Plumstead. Those who are really ill cannot as a rule afford to pay for medical skill, and everyone is too busy to have time for imaginary complaints. I have no patients at the moment that I cannot leave, except the man who lives out in the direction of Pig Hill, and I thought that I would ride over there this afternoon, and then we would start at dawn to-morrow morning. You don't ride, do you?"

"Not much, and I am sure that I could not sit on Rockefeller, because he is so clumsy," said Nealie.

"Then I will borrow Jim Brown's two-wheeled cart; but I think that we shall have to take your horse, because mine is rather worn. The track out to Pig Hill is a heavy one, and I have been there every day of late," said the doctor, and then he hurried away to see his patients in the town, while Nealie did her best to arrange for leaving the others for a few days.

There was one thing which Nealie had to do that she could not speak of to the doctor, who had been so truly good to them. Her money was exhausted save for a few shillings, and, being face to face with dest.i.tution, and not sure of finding her father even when she reached Mostyn, she must have money from somewhere.

In her extremity she thought of Mr. Runciman, and although it would take most of her remaining shillings to cable to him, she had determined to do it.

When Dr. Plumstead had started for Pig Hill she found her way to the telegraph office and dispatched her pitiful request.

"Please send us some money, we have not found Father here.

"Cornelia Plumstead."

But cables are expensive things, and when she came to send it she found that she would not have enough money for the whole, and had to shorten it, so that when it actually went it was more a demand than a plea:

"Send us money; Father not here."

"And if he does not send it, whatever shall we do?" cried Sylvia, who had to be told, if only for the sake of sobering her and making her more keenly alive to the responsibilities of the situation.

"He will send it, I am quite sure," replied Nealie, with a beautiful faith in Mr. Runciman's real goodness of heart that was justified in due course by the arrival of a cablegram authorizing her to draw fifty pounds from the Hammerville bank as she needed it.

But she had to start off in the grey dawn of the next morning, in company with the usurping Dr. Plumstead--as Sylvia would persist in calling him--without knowing that her need was to be met in this generous manner. It was perhaps the very darkest hour in her life, and her face was drawn and pinched with the weight of her care as she lifted it to the cold grey of the sky when she mounted into the high two-wheeled cart which the doctor had borrowed for the journey. But even as she looked, all the grey was flushed with rose colour from the rising sun, and the sight brought back her courage with a rush, so that she was able to turn and smile at the little group gathered at the door of the doctor's house to see her drive away.

"Mind you take good care of Rupert, Sylvia," she called, feeling that her next sister was really not old enough for such a heavy responsibility; only, as there was no one else to take it, of course Sylvia would have to do her best.

"I will see that she looks after him properly," said Rumple, with a wag of his head, at which the doctor laughed; for when sleep seized upon Rumple he was of little use in looking after other people.

Don and Billykins flung up their caps and shouted hurrah as Rockefeller moved off, and Ducky joined in with her shrill treble, so that Nealie felt they were doing their very best to keep her spirits up at the moment of parting, and she could not let them think their efforts were wasted in the least; therefore she waved her hand and tried to appear as free from care as the rest of them.

After the heavy wagon, Rockefeller made short work of the light-weight cart, and went along at such a tremendous pace that Nealie would certainly have been afraid if anyone but Dr. Plumstead had been driving.

His treatment of Rupert, however, had inspired her with such confidence in him that she sat smiling and untroubled while the big, clumsy, vanhorse cut capers in the road, and then danced on all-fours because a small boy rushed out of one of the little wooden houses on the other side of the town and blew a blast on a bugle right under the horse's nose.

"It really looks as if the creature had not had enough work for the last three or four weeks," said the doctor, with a laugh, as he proceeded to get pace out of Rocky in preference to pranks.

"It is a very good horse and has done us good service," said Nealie, in a rather breathless fashion, as a sudden swerve on the part of Rocky sent her flying against the doctor, and then, as she settled back into her own corner and clutched at the side of the cart to keep from being tossed out, she went on in an anxious tone: "I wonder what Mr. Wallis will say to our keeping Rocky to go this journey instead of at once handing him over to the nearest agent of the firm?"

"If he is the wise and just man that I take him to be he will say that you have done quite right," replied the doctor. "You have not reached your father yet, and you must have the horse for this extra journey, don't you see?"

Nealie shook her head as if in doubt about this sort of reasoning, and then she sat silent for so long that the doctor might have believed her to be asleep, if he had not seen that her gaze was fixed on the landscape.

The district outside Hammerville on the Mostyn track was at first mainly composed of rich pasture, mostly settled by dairy farmers, although farther away on the higher ground it was sheep farming that was most in evidence.

Twenty miles out of Hammerville the road had dwindled to a gra.s.sy track, and as they were now on the northern side of the Murrumbidgee River the country grew very wild and mountainous, the track cut through forests which the doctor told Nealie had only been half-explored, and the hilltops were so solitary that it did not seem as if there were any people in the world at all.

But it was a well-watered country, and on every side there were brawling little streams rushing down precipitous heights or scurrying away through woody valleys, as if anxious to find the very nearest way to the sea.

By the time the hottest part of the day had arrived Rockefeller had done half the journey to Mostyn, and driving up to a lone house the doctor was so fortunate as to find a woman living there, to whose care he confided Nealie for a few hours' rest and refreshment while he took a siesta lying on the ground under the cart, which had been drawn close under the shade of the willows fringing the river at this part.

It was sundown before they reached Mostyn, and then it was only to be met with disappointment, for the doctor had been sent for to cope with an outbreak of smallpox at Latimer.

"That settles it!" exclaimed the doctor. "I shall drive you back to Hammerville to-morrow morning, for certainly I cannot take you to a disease-stricken town, and equally I cannot leave you here."

"I shall not go back until I have found Father," said Nealie, smiling up at him in a way that somehow robbed her words of their mutinous flavour.

"And there is no need to worry about the danger of taking me to a smallpox place, because I had the complaint when I was a little girl, before I was old enough to remember, so there is no danger for me."

The doctor was very hard to convince on this score, and was even inclined to throw doubt on her statement, and to declare that she must be mistaken, as it was so extremely unlikely that a child in her position would contract the disease.

Nealie met all his arguments in silence until he came to his doubts about her really having had the disease, and then she quietly rolled up the left sleeve of her thin blouse and showed him two distinct marks on the soft flesh above the elbow, which any doctor must know were pock marks.

"I must go until I find my father, and if you will not take me I must go alone," she said, when he left off arguing because he had no more to say; but her gaze was very wistful, for Mostyn was so much rougher than Hammerville that her heart sank very low as she thought of how rough Latimer might be.

"If you must go I must certainly go too, for I cannot let you out of my care in places like this," he said in a tone as decided as her own.

For that one night she was lodged with a good woman who cleaned the church and school, and who kept her awake for half the night telling her gruesome stories of happenings in disease-stricken towns, such as Latimer was at that moment supposed to be. But if she thought to frighten Nealie into consenting to go back to Hammerville without finding her father she made a very great mistake indeed.

Bad as had been the journey of the doctor and his escort when he rode from Mostyn to Latimer through the fierce heat, the experiences of young Dr. Plumstead and Nealie were still worse. Rockefeller had lost the fine vigour displayed on the first part of the journey, and went at a slow trot, hanging his head and stumbling so often that Dr. Plumstead was forced into a pretty liberal use of the whip to keep the creature on his feet at all.

There was a strong wind blowing to-day, but luckily it came from behind, and so Nealie opened a big umbrella, which kept off some of the dust and also acted as a sail and helped them along. Sun, wind, and dust seemed to bring on a sort of fever in Nealie; her hands burned like coals of fire, she had a lightheaded sensation, and saw so many visions during the last miles of that trying journey that she could never after determine which was real and which was fancy of all the incidents and happenings of that long, weary day.

"Hullo, look at that smoke yonder; is it a bush fire, I wonder, or is it possible they have been having a big blaze at Latimer?" said the doctor, pointing with his whip to the crest of a long hill up which the track wound its dusty way.

"Are we near to Latimer?" asked Nealie in a languid tone.

"I think we ought to be by this time, unless we have come wrong. But what a hill! I fancy Rockefeller expects me to walk up here," said the doctor, who was secretly very anxious concerning that smoke which was hanging in a cloud about the crest of the hill.