n might be dying like
flies from some contagious disease with never a doctor to help them. It
was life at its roughest and wildest in that back country, and he could
not let Nealie venture alone in her youth and ignorance where so many
perils might beset her path.

Day was beginning to dawn when he heard Rupert speaking, and then with a
tap at the door he entered to see how it fared with his patient.

"I am better, thank you, and I am very much obliged to you for all that
you have done for me," said Rupert weakly.

"Ah, I think that you will do now, by the look of you," said the doctor
in a cheerful tone. "And now, with your consent, I am going to take your
sister to hunt up your father, for I don't feel equal to all seven of
you singlehanded," and he burst into a hearty laugh at his own small
joke.

CHAPTER XVII

In the Thick of It

A hundred miles or more from Mostyn, right out on the sandy plains,
beyond the gap in the mountains which they called the Devil's Bridge,
there had been a gold find. A gold prospector had been found lying in
the mulga scrub with a big nugget in his hand, while his swag, when
unrolled, had shown a whole handful of lesser nuggets.

The poor wretch had found gold, but had died of thirst, and those who
found him came perilously near to sharing the same fate, so keenly
anxious were they to make the dead yield up the knowledge of his find,
by tracing his poor wandering footprints round and round and in and out
among the hillocks of sand, the clumps of spinifex, and the mulga scrub.

But one man, more human than the rest, elected to dig a grave where the
dead might rest secure from the ravages of the wandering dingo, and
although the others laughed at him, calling him names, and going away
leaving him to do his work of mercy alone, he stuck grimly at his task,
probing down between the roots of the mulga bushes to make a hollow deep
enough to form a decent resting place for the nameless dead.

He was quite alone now, save for the quiet figure on the ground and a
hoodie crow which was perched on a swaying branch at a little distance,
watching the living and the dead with anxious beady eyes.

Down under the top layer of sand the ground was stony, and the man who
dug was weak from long tramping in search of the gold he could not find.
Of choice he would have gone away and left the still figure where he had
found it, but it might be that some day he too would lie like this, with
sta