given up to piles of metal rails and
wooden ties and ballast for the track. The stores are large fronted, with
a mockery which would lead the unenlightened to believe they are
two-storied; but this is make-believe. The upper windows have no rooms
behind them. They are the result of overweening vanity on the part of the
City Council and have nothing to do with the storekeepers.

The place is unremarkable for anything else, unless it be the dirty and
unpaved condition of its street. True there are other houses, private
residences, but these are set indiscriminately upon the surrounding
prairie, and have no relation to any roads. A row of blue gum trees marks
the front of each, and, for the most part, a clothes-line, bearing some
articles of washing, indicates the back. Beacon Crossing would be bragged
about only by those who helped to make it.

The only building worth consideration is the hotel, opposite the depot.
This has a verandah and a tie-post, and there are always horses standing
outside it, and always men standing on the verandah, except when it is
raining, then they are to be found inside.

It was only a little after eight in the morning. Breakfast was nearly over
in the hotel, and, to judge by the number of saddle-horses at the
tie-post, the people of Beacon Crossing were very much astir. Presently
the verandah began to fill with hard-faced, rough-clad men. And most of
them as they came were filling their pipes, which suggested that they had
just eaten.

Nevil Steyne was one of the earliest to emerge from the breakfast room. He
had been the last to go in, and the moment he reappeared it was to survey
swiftly the bright blue distance away in the direction of the Indian
Reservations, and, unseen by those who stood around, he smiled ever so
slightly at what he beheld. The two men nearest him were talking
earnestly, and their earnestness was emphasized by the number of matches
they used in keeping their pipes alight.

"Them's Injun fires, sure," said one, at the conclusion of a long
argument.

"Maybe they are, Dan," said the other, an angular man who ran a small
hardware store a few yards lower down the street. "But they ain't on this
side of the Reservation anyway."

The significant selfishness of his last remark brought the other round on
him in a moment.

"That's all you care for, eh?" Dan said witheringly. "Say. I'm working for
the 'diamond P's,' and they run their stock that aways. Hev you been
throug