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Chapter I. The Bush Fire.

The sun a blood-red lamp, swinging low from a white hot sky. The thirsty earth all agape in wide cracks for rain which fell not. The grass—no longer grass, but pale-brown dust, floating away with every breath of the hot, hot wind, to join the cloud of sand travelling constantly southward. Sombre pendent foliage, sighing and moaning, living things gasping and panting, all nature wilting and withering under the torture of drought. Earth and air and sky pervaded and darkened by the scent and smoke of burning bush. The creek, a mere piccaninny stream at its best, now resolved into a few muddy, fast-evaporating pools with long dry spaces between. The horizon, one band of flame, held under in daytime by the strength of the sun, but by night revealing itself in a fiery circle of hissing, crackling, roaring destruction. Flames springing from tree-top to tree-top, leaving in their wake charred smoking ruins of trunks that stretched forth naked, knotty, blackened limbs as in agonized protest; advancing with relentless rapidity upon the yet unscathed giants that quivered and writhed and shrivelled in expectation of the dread approach. Lovely many-coloured birds, dazed and gasping, hovering in the smoky air a space, then dropping with piteous little shrieks into the red death below. Butterflies and locusts, beetles and bugs of varieties and tints page 6without number, all falling before that most remorseless and cruel of life's foes—fire.

Fire! Pure and powerful and pitiless as Calvin's ideal deity, crueller even than its brother enemy—water. For the sea kills its victims tenderly, folding them to rest in close swaying embrace, kissing them to peace with keen cold kisses, lulling their brief agony with the musical rhythm of many waters, restoring them perhaps—still and white and rigid, with the seal of eternity upon their faces—to light, and to them who wait and watch by the shore.

But fire, deadly and insatiable, wraps them with torturing arms, licks them with shining, blistering tongues, bites and stings every inch of tender skin and sensitive flesh with unutterable pain ere yielding them up to death, disfigures and distorts till even they who have loved best and longest are glad to put the hideousness out of sight.

All round and about Merlyn Creek raged the bush fire, so that communication between that and other townships was for the present entirely cut off, and the men of Merlyn Creek waited about anxiously, bearing sacks and big boughs of trees which they had soaked as well as possible in the fast-diminishing brackish fluid in the Good Luck Company's dam. For they said that any increase of wind must inevitably bring the fire in upon them, and they knew their only chance of saving their homes, and perhaps their lives, lay in beating out the flames as they approached.

Snakes slid quickly and in numbers into the township, and were slain and left writhing in their dusty tracks. Half-a-dozen young kangaroos, naturally more timid than deer, lopped panting into the very midst of the human crowd, and submitted without resistance to capture for sake of a drink of the all-too-scarce water. The sun seemed hardly to move, so slowly did he travel his day's journey, and the hazy atmosphere quivered and throbbed with intensity of heat.

And amidst it all, beneath the calico roof of a one-roomed weatherboard tenement, lay a woman, dying. No question of the portent of that ashen shadow creeping over the pinched page 7face, of that far-seeing look in the glazing eyes that seemed already to penetrate and gaze beyond the mysterious curtain that divides the world of the dead from the world of the living.

She had dragged herself from off her narrow bed and lay beneath it, for sake of contact with the cool earthen floor, and shelter from the glaring light and heat that poured mercilessly through the canvas roof. Close beside her crouched a child—her child, as anyone might see by looking once upon the two faces in close proximity there.

The little one's eyes were full of vague pain and dread; her tiny fingers clutched and clasped with all their small might the thin chill fingers of the mother. Now and then a faint suppressed moan from the woman drew forth a plaintive responsive wail from the child.

'My little girl!'

'Mother! Oh, mother!'

Then the panting struggle went wordlessly on again for a while; and the grey shadow deepened, and the dark eyes looked further away into the Great Beyond; coming back ever and anon to dwell awhile with passionate sorrow and infinite yearning on the small miserable face close by.

'Berta.'

'Yes, mother; are you thirsty again?'

The woman nodded feebly, and the child shot swiftly across the floor to where stood a black old billy-can.

'It is so hot, and it looks so muddy,' she said, peering in at the contents dubiously. 'Mother, darling, wouldn't you like it better if it was made into tea?'

But the mother shook her head. 'I want it cold, Berta; I must have something cold.'

'And it isn't cold,' said the child, in distress. 'Feel!' lifting one limp hand and placing it against the can, 'it is quite hot, isn't it?'

The mother turned away with a faint gesture of distaste and weariness.

'Never mind, pet. I can—do—without,'

Then the little one set up a cry.

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'What can I do to make it cool?' she wailed. 'Oh—Our Father who art in heaven, show me —do show me—how to make it cool.'

Down on her little knees went she with this prayer; hands and eyes turned up to the canvas in passionate appeal.

The mother looked round with a shadowy smile, her thoughts reverting to the frequent occasions on which she had surreptitiously played Providence, and answered Berta's childish petitions for one small boon or another.

'Poor little one! Our Father in heaven does not work miracles nowadays.'

'Then why doesn't He?' cried Berta, clenching both diminutive fists. 'Now is the time for Him; I never wanted anything in my life so much as I want this. I will never want anything again, if He will only give me this. Just a little cold water; such a little thing to ask. Oh, He must! Gentle Jesus, O give me just a little cold water for my mother!'

But even faith, which, it is promised, shall enable men to move mountains, availed nothing to Berta then. She bent herself till her forehead rested on the ground, and hot salt water showered abundantly enough from her eyes; but of cold water, to moisten parched dying lips, there was none. Suddenly she sprang to her feet with a glad exclamation.

'I know—I know!' she cried, 'Jamieson's Waterhole. I'll go at once.'

'But, Berta, it is so far.'

'Not if I run. I'll run all the way, mother. Such cold lovely water. Oh, mother, let me go.'

The mother looked up wistfully.

'I am so thirsty,' she said.

'Yes, I am going. Mother, I will back in a minute almost.'

'Your hat, child; you must have your hat.'

'Yes, I'm getting it,' rummaging with impatient hands in a heap of wearing apparel till she discovered and brought to light a crushed straw hat that had but one string.

Thrusting this upon her head with one hand, and pouring out the contents of the billy with the other, she rushed to the page 9door. Then stopped all suddenly, and, running back, flung herself down and caught her mother's hands in her own.

'Mother, you will not die before I come back. Promise me, truly, that you will wait for me.'

'I'll wait, love, I'll wait. But, oh, be very quick, my pet, be very quick.'

Picking up hat and can again, the child sped away through the hot dry air and along the dusty road, scarce pausing once in her rapid flight until Jamieson's homestead came in view.

The Jamiesons were 'cockatoos;' their waterhole was a supreme necessity to them and their cattle during those long hot summers. It was a deep wide clay-cemented reservoir of carefully caught rainwater, and was quite close to the house.

'Hi! what are you up to there? Do you want to get drowned, you little sprat?'

Poor Berta, in her fright at being thus roughly accosted, was within an ace of tumbling through the narrow aperture in the covering of the tank. A stout red-faced damsel sauntered lazily over from the house, sheltering her head from the sun with a dirty towel.

'And what are you after, you small wasp? she inquired.

'Just a little cold water, please,' said the child, ready to cringe and fawn like a lost dog in the earnestness of her desire. 'Just the tiniest billyful of cold water for my mother, please. She is very ill.'

'Ill, is she? What is the matter with her?'

'I don't know, ma'am, but she is very ill.'

'And what's her name? And where do you come from?' pursued the maid, gossip and news being too rare at Jamieson's to justify her in missing any.

'I came from the township, please,' answered Philiberta humbly. Then, with a sobbing catch of her breath, 'Oh, you wouldn't mind being in a hurry, ma'am! She is so thirsty—my mother; and she said she would wait.'

'Well, look out,' said the damsel, fastening a rope to the billy handle as she spoke. 'There you are!' drawing up the can filled to the brim.

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'Oh! Oh! thank you!'

'Don't you want a drink yourself?'

'Yes—no—I want all this for my mother.'

'But you'll spill half of it on the way, I say!'

'Yes.'

'Come into the house and I'll give you a drink of milk.'

'I can't stay,' said Philiberta, making off hurriedly.

'And cream—thick cream,' cried the girl.

'I can't stay, please,' from the child, already several yards away on the homeward road.

'And jam—gooseberry jam,' shouted the temptress, with her hand to her mouth, trumpet-wise.

The faintest little cry of acknowledgment came back on the scorching wind, and then a turn of the road and a cloud of dust hid the child from view.

'Well I'm blessed!' ejaculated the kitchen representative of Jamieson's; 'what a queer little beggar it is; and sunstruck it will be as safe as eggs before it's anyway near the township. And the water'll all be spilt the way she's running; and I did'nt get a word—not even her name out of her, the tiny dot.'

When the child found that spilling the water was inevitably the result of haste, she slackened speed; and, looking to right and left of the road, she presently espied a gleam of tender purple in amongst a patch of scrub. Setting her can on the ground, she clambered up and captured a blossoming festoon of sarsaparilla, the only sign of flower life anywhere in the parched locality. It took her scarce a half minute to secure it, yet the delay started her into a quicker pace than before, and so she hastened on until she was once more in the township. And while yet afar off her heart smote her reproachfully at sight of the wide open door of her mother's house.

'I didn't shut it properly,' she said, striking herself an angry little blow on the breast,' and the dust and hot wind have been blowing in on her all this time.'

Another moment and she had entered.

'Mother, I'm so sorry about the door. But I've got the page 11water. Look, you can see right to the bottom of the billy; so clear, so cool. And this flower—mother. Oh, mother!'

Alack! alack! for the thirsty mother had not waited.