oolhouse, and the building was promptly hauled back into
shape and fastened down with long timbers running from its sides to a
convenient red-gum stump at the back. Thus it remained for many years,
bulging at the sides, pitching forward, and straining at its tethers like
an eager hound in a leash.

It was literally a humming hot day at Waddy; the pulsing whirr of
invisible locusts filled the whole air with a drowsy hum, and from the
flat at the back of the township, where a few thousand ewes and lambs
were shepherded amongst the quarry holes, came another insistent droning
in a deeper note, like the murmur of distant surf. No one was stirring:
to the right and left along the single thin wavering line of unpainted
weatherworn wooden houses nothing moved but mirage waters flickering in
the hollows of the ironstone road. Equally deserted was the wide stretch
of brown plain, dotted with poppet legs and here and there a whim, across
the dull expanse of which Waddy seemed to peer with stupid eyes.

From within the school were heard alternately, with the regularity of a
mill, the piping of an old cracked voice and the brave chanting of a
childish chorus. Under the school, where the light was dim and the air
was decidedly musty, two small boys were crouched, playing a silent game
of 'stag knife.' Besides being dark and evil-smelling under there, it was
damp; great clammy masses of cobweb hung from the joists and spanned the
spaces between the piles. The place was haunted by strange and fearsome
insects, too, and the moving of the classes above sent showers of dust
down between the cracks in the worn floor. But those boys were satisfied
that they were having a perfectly blissful time, and were serenely happy
in defiance of unpropitious surroundings. They were 'playing the wag,'
and to be playing the wag under any circumstances is a guarantee of pure
felicity to the average healthy boy.

Probably the excessive heat had suggested to Dick Haddon the advisability
of spending the afternoon under the school instead of within the close
crowded room; at any rate he suggested it to Jacker McKnight, commonly
known as Jacker Mack, and now after an hour of it the boys were still
jubilant. The game had to be played with great caution, and conversation
was conducted in whispers when ideas could not be conveyed in dumb show.
All that was going on in the room above was distinctly audible to the
deserters below, and the joy of camping there out