miles away.

I threw back my head and stared up at the branches, in desperation;
and--Well, I don't ask you to take much stock in this, though most old
Bushmen will believe anything of the Bush by night; and--Now, it might
have been that I was all unstrung, or it might have been a patch of sky
outlined in the gently moving branches, or the blue smoke rising up. But
I saw the figure of a woman, all white, come down, down, nearly to the
limbs of the trees, point on up the main road, and then float up and up
and vanish, still pointing. I thought Mary was dead! Then it flashed on
me----

Four or five miles up the road, over the 'saddle', was an old shanty
that had been a half-way inn before the Great Western Line got round as
far as Dubbo and took the coach traffic off those old Bush roads. A man
named Brighten lived there. He was a selector; did a little farming,
and as much sly-grog selling as he could. He was married--but it wasn't
that: I'd thought of them, but she was a childish, worn-out, spiritless
woman, and both were pretty 'ratty' from hardship and loneliness--they
weren't likely to be of any use to me. But it was this: I'd heard talk,
among some women in Gulgong, of a sister of Brighten's wife who'd gone
out to live with them lately: she'd been a hospital matron in the city,
they said; and there were yarns about her. Some said she got the sack
for exposing the doctors--or carrying on with them--I didn't remember
which. The fact of a city woman going out to live in such a place, with
such people, was enough to make talk among women in a town twenty miles
away, but then there must have been something extra about her, else
Bushmen wouldn't have talked and carried her name so far; and I wanted
a woman out of the ordinary now. I even reasoned this way, thinking
like lightning, as I knelt over Jim between the big back wheels of the
waggon.

I had an old racing mare that I used as a riding hack, following the
team. In a minute I had her saddled and bridled; I tied the end of a
half-full chaff-bag, shook the chaff into each end and dumped it on to
the pommel as a cushion or buffer for Jim; I wrapped him in a blanket,
and scrambled into the saddle with him.

The next minute we were stumbling down the steep bank, clattering and
splashing over the crossing, and struggling up the opposite bank to the
level. The mare, as I told you, was an old racer, but broken-winded--she
must have run without wind after the first half