uch
bushier than others. Yarloo chose one which was very wide-spreading,
and began piling dry bark and twigs and anything which would burn
quickly and easily, right in the middle of the tree, all among the
branches. He went on till the needle-bush was carrying as big a load
as it possibly could.

Then he made fire. He pulled two pieces of wood out of his hair; one
was the size of a man's palm, a flat piece of soft bean-wood with a
little hollow in the middle of it; the other was a stick about as thick
as a pencil but nearly twice as long, of hard mulga wood. He squatted
down and set the soft piece on the ground and held it in place with his
toes, and teased out a few pieces of very dry bark till they were like
tinder, and put it near the hollow. Then he took the long piece of
mulga and twirled it with his two hands in the hollow. He did this
faster than any white man could possibly twirl it, and in a couple of
minutes a coil of smoke came up from the pile of bark. Yarloo blew
this into a flame and made a little fire. When it was burning well, he
threw the blazing sticks into the needle-bush. There was a crackling
sound for a moment or two and then a roar, as the flames licked up the
dry fuel, till in a very short time the needle-bush was a blazing
bonfire.

The black-fellow waited till the flames had died down, and then started
to dig around the roots a few feet away from the tree. He was so
skilful at this that he soon exposed the main roots. Then he chopped
off one or two of them and set the pieces upright in the quart-pot. A
thin dark liquid began to drain out of the roots and collect in the pot
till it was half-full. Yarloo took a drink and chopped up some more
roots, and when the quart-pot was full he returned to camp.

It needed great care and patience to minister to the perishing white
boys, and not many natives would have done what Yarloo did for Sax and
Vaughan during that blazing day. He made trip after trip to the stony
plain where the needle-bushes were growing, and, with the water
obtained in this way, he gradually revived his two friends. Sax was
his first care, and after he had softened the boy's tongue so that
drops of liquid could trickle down his throat, the drover's son quickly
revived sufficiently to help Yarloo with the more serious case of
Vaughan. The powers of recovery which a healthy lad possesses are
wonderful, and before nightfall both lads were sitting up under the
shelter