was the best they were ever at.

Chapter XIII.

The Summer Old Bob Died.

It was a real scorcher. A soft, sweltering summer's day. The air
quivered; the heat drove the fowls under the dray and sent the old dog
to sleep upon the floor inside the house. The iron on the skillion
cracked and sweated--so did Dad and Dave down the paddock,
grubbing--grubbing, in 130 degrees of sunshine. They were clearing a
piece of new land--a heavily-timbered box-tree flat. They had been at
it a fortnight, and if any music was in the ring of the axe or the
rattle of the pick when commencing, there was none now.

Dad wished to be cheerful and complacent. He said (putting the pick
down and dragging his flannel off to wring it): "It's a good thing to
sweat well." Dave did n't say anything. I don't know what he thought,
but he looked up at Dad--just looked up at him--while the perspiration
filled his eyes and ran down over his nose like rain off a shingle;
then he hitched up his pants and "wired in" again.

Dave was a philosopher. He worked away until the axe flew off the
handle with a ring and a bound, and might have been lost in the long
grass for ever only Dad stopped it with his shin. I fancy he did n't
mean to stop it when I think how he jumped--it was the only piece of
excitement there had been the whole of that relentlessly solemn
fortnight. Dad got vexed--he was in a hurry with the grubbing--and
said he never could get anything done without something going wrong.
Dave was n't sorry the axe came off--he knew it meant half-an-hour in
the shade fixing it on again. "Anyway," Dad went on, "we'll go to
dinner now."

On the way to the house he several times looked at the sky--that
cloudless, burning sky--and said--to no one in particular, "I wish to
God it would rain!" It sounded like an aggravated prayer. Dave did
n't speak, and I don't think Dad expected he would.

Joe was the last to sit down to dinner, and he came in steaming hot.
He had chased out of sight a cow that had poked into the cultivation.
Joe mostly went about with green bushes in his hat, to keep his head
cool, and a few gum-leaves were now sticking in his moist and matted
hair.

"I put her out, Dad!" he said, casting an eager glare at everything on
the table. "She tried to jump and got stuck on the fence, and broke it
all down. On'y I could n't get anything, I'd er broke 'er head--there
was n't a thing, on'y dead cornstalks and cow-dung abou