story.

When Arvie came out it was beginning to rain and the hands had all gone
except Bill, who stood with his back to a verandah-post, spitting with
very fair success at the ragged toe of one boot. He looked up, nodded
carelessly at Arvie, and then made a dive for a passing lorry, on the
end of which he disappeared round the next corner, unsuspected by the
driver, who sat in front with his pipe in his mouth and a bag over his
shoulders.

Arvie started home with his heart and mind pretty full, and a stronger,
stranger aversion to ever going back to the shop again. This new,
unexpected, and unsought-for friendship embarrassed the poor lonely
child. It wasn't welcome.

But he never went back. He got wet going home, and that night he was a
dying child. He had been ill all the time, and Collins was one "baby"
short next day.

The Selector's Daughter

I.

She rode slowly down the steep siding from the main road to a track in
the bed of the Long Gully, the old grey horse picking his way zig-zag
fashion. She was about seventeen, slight in figure, and had a pretty
freckled face with a pathetically drooping mouth, and big sad brown
eyes. She wore a faded print dress, with an old black riding skirt drawn
over it, and her head was hidden in one of those ugly, old-fashioned
white hoods, which, seen from the rear, always suggest an old woman.
She carried several parcels of groceries strapped to the front of the
dilapidated side-saddle.

The track skirted a chain of rocky waterholes at the foot of the gully,
and the girl glanced nervously at these ghastly, evil-looking pools as
she passed them by. The sun had set, as far as Long Gully was concerned.
The old horse carefully followed a rough bridle track, which ran up the
gully now on one side of the watercourse and now on the other; the gully
grew deeper and darker, and its sullen, scrub-covered sides rose more
steeply as he progressed.

The girl glanced round frequently, as though afraid of someone following
her. Once she drew rein, and listened to some bush sound. "Kangaroos,"
she murmured; it was only kangaroos. She crossed a dimmed little
clearing where a farm had been, and entered a thick scrub of box and
stringy-bark saplings. Suddenly with a heavy thud, thud, an "old man"
kangaroo leapt the path in front, startling the girl fearfully, and went
up the siding towards the peak.

"Oh, my God!" she gasped, with her hand on her heart.

She was very nervo