e a bit," he said. "It's only that beastly prickly
bush, for all it looks like a forest of red gum at the very least from
here, but there'll be a scrap of shade, and I'm getting tired. There's
water there sometimes, but it was dry as a bone last time I passed."

"It's a grand country!" sighed Turner.

"By George!" said Stanesby, "I never will come back this way. Why should
I, now I 'm free to do as I please?"

Why, indeed? And Turner's thoughts immediately flew back to the
dark-eyed girl, and the solitary hut as he had last seen it through the
haze of the morning, with that red heap lying there carelessly flung
aside, and the black fellow stalking away. Why should he go back? Why
indeed? Only to have that scene repeated. Better go straight on to
England, and home, and pretty, fair-haired, blue-eyed Gladys Rowan.

So they lay there in the scanty shade and spelled, and built a small
fire of dry sticks, and filled the billy from the waterbag that hung at
each horse's neck, and boiled their tea, and ate their humble mid-day
meal, and dozed the afternoon away, lazily watching the hobbled horses
as they searched on the still damp edges of the shallow clay pan for
such scanty grass as the moisture induced to grow there. They
hardly spoke, they had nothing in common now; once they reached
the head-station, they would part never to meet again. Each felt it
instinctively, and each was thankful that it should be so. The sooner
the parting came, the better now.

The shadows of the thorny bushes began to grow longer and longer as
the sun sank in the west, and they mounted their horses and started off
again. Then the sun went down, and the colour faded out of the sky as
the stars, bright points of light, came out one by one. The new moon was
a silver rim clear cut in the west, and not a sound broke the stillness.
How lonely it was, how intensely lonely! Turner thought of the poor girl
alone in the hut miles behind them, and wondered if his companion too
were thinking of her. After all, surely the very loneliness gave safety.
At any rate, she was safe at night. If the blacks did not attack at dusk
they would leave her alone for the night. But the morning--next morning!
Was it right to leave her? He himself had no faith in the myall blacks,
they were treacherous, they were cruel. Had he not come over to arrange
some plan of campaign against them? And yet he went away and left that
girl at their mercy, completely at their mercy. He