NCTUARY

XI. THE FALLING NIGHT

XII. THE DREAM

XIII. THE HAND OF THE SCULPTOR

PART III

THE OPEN HEAVEN

I. THE VERDICT

II. THE TIDE COMES BACK

III. THE GAME

IV. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

V. THE DESERT ROAD

VI. THE ENCOUNTER

VII. THE PLACE OF REPENTANCE

VIII. THE RELEASE OP THE PRISONER

IX. HOLY GROUND

EPILOGUE

The Bars of Iron

PROLOGUE

"Fight? I'll fight you with pleasure, but I shall probably kill you if I
do. Do you want to be killed?" Brief and contemptuous the question fell.
The speaker was a mere lad. He could not have been more than nineteen.
But he held himself with the superb British assurance that has its root
in the British public school and which, once planted, in certain soils is
wholly ineradicable.

The man he faced was considerably his superior in height and build. He
also was British, but he had none of the other's careless ease of
bearing. He stood like an angry bull, with glaring, bloodshot eyes.

He swore a terrific oath in answer to the scornful enquiry. "I'll break
every bone in your body!" he vowed. "You little, sneering bantam, I'll
smash your face in! I'll thrash you to a pulp!"

The other threw up his head and laughed. He was sublimely unafraid. But
his dark eyes shone red as he flung back the challenge. "All right, you
drunken bully! Try!" he said.

They stood in the garish light of a Queensland bar, surrounded by an
eager, gaping crowd of farmers, boundary-riders, sheep-shearers, who had
come down to this township on the coast on business or pleasure at the
end of the shearing season.

None of them knew how the young Englishman came to be among them. He
seemed to have entered the drinking-saloon without any very definite
object in view, unless he had been spurred thither by a spirit of
adventure. And having entered, a boyish interest in the motley crowd,
which was evidently new to him, had induced him to remain. He had sat in
a corner, keenly observant but wholly unobtrusive, for the greater part
of an hour, till in fact the attention of the great bully now confronting
him had by some ill-chance been turned in his direction.

The man was three parts drunk, and for some reason, not very
comprehensible, he had chosen to resent the presence of this
clean-limbed, clean-featured English lad. Possibly he recognized in him a
type which for its very cleanness