ight, Mrs Mac, to have a look at that there
swingle-bar of mine?"

"With pleasure, Harry," she said, "for you're a white man, anyway. I'll
bring ye a light. An' all the lights in heaven if I could, an'--an' in
the other place if they'd help ye."

When he'd looked to the swingle-bar, and had mounted to his place and
untwisted the reins from a side-bar, she cried:

"An' as for them two, Harry, shpill them in the first creek you come to,
an' God be good to you! It's all they're fit for, the low blaggards, to
insult an honest woman alone in the bush in a place like this."

"All right, Mrs Mac," said Harry, cheerfully. "Good night, Mrs Mac."

"Good night, Harry, an' God go with ye, for the creeks are risen after
last night's storm." And Harry drove on and left her to think over it.

She thought over it in a way that would have been unexpected to Harry,
and would have made him uneasy, for he was really good-natured. She sat
down on a stool by the fire, and presently, after thinking over it a
bit, two big, lonely tears rolled down the lonely woman's fair, fat,
blonde cheeks in the firelight.

"An' to think of Old Jack," she said. "The very last man in the world
I'd dreamed of turning on me. But--but I always thought Old Jack was
goin' a bit ratty, an' maybe I was a bit hard on him. God forgive us
all!"

Had Harry Chatswood seen her then he would have been sorry he did it.
Swagmen and broken-hearted new chums had met worse women than Mother
Mac.

But she pulled herself together, got up and bustled round. She put
on more wood, swept the hearth, put a parcel of fresh steak and
sausages--brought by the coach--on to a clean plate on the table, and
got some potatoes into a dish; for Chatswood had told her that her
first and longest and favourite stepson was not far behind him with
the bullock team. Before she had finished the potatoes she heard the
clock-clock of heavy wheels and the crack of the bullock whip coming
along the dark bush track.

But the very next morning a man riding back from Croydon called, and
stuck his head under the veranda eaves with a bush greeting, and she
told him all about it.

He straightened up, and tickled the back of his head with his little
finger, and gaped at her for a minute.

"Why," he said, "that wasn't no excise officer. I know him well--I was
drinking with him at the Royal last night afore we went to bed, an' had
a nip with him this morning afore we started. Why! that's Bobby Howel