your food, if the fever comes
back--it won't if you keep quiet--but if it does--hot
bottles--blankets--laudanum--I've mixed the doses--until you get into a
sweat. Remember that. And you'll have someone in your room to-night.'

'In my room--YOU? What do you mean?'

'It won't be me--I'm going away.'

'Going away--what is it?'

She noticed that he turned and looked at the sky.

'Why is it so dark--and the heat so stifling?' she asked.

'These damned Unionists have fired the only good pasture left on
Moongarr. It's been burning since two o'clock this morning. I sent the
men out. Now I'm going myself--to save what I can.'

He left the room abruptly. In a minute or two she heard him outside
calling 'Cudgee... Harris'--and then giving the order to saddle up. She
got out of bed and tottered to the window. She could see now the wide
range of the disaster. The lurid haze was spreading. The horizon
shrinking, and the air was hotter than ever. The fire seemed still a
long way off, but there was nothing to stop the flames if once they
reached the great plain. The course of the river, here at best a mere
string of shallow waterholes, was quite dry. The rain of the other
night had been too insignificant and local to do any good. The brown
mud-strip round the lagoon below, was not perceptibly diminished. She
knew that the narrow water channels flowing from their one working
artesian bore, must soon be licked up by the flames. And the Bore in
process of construction, was at a standstill for want of workmen.

Bridget gazed out despairingly towards the shrinking horizon and upon
the parched plain with the rugged clumps of dun coloured gum trees
scattered upon it--the near ones looking like trees of painted tin,
sun-blistered. The swarms of flies, mosquitoes in the veranda offended
her. She disliked the cattle dogs mooching round with hanging jaws and
slavering tongues. The ferocious chuckle of a great grey
king-fisher--the bird which white people called the laughing
jackass--perched on the branch of a gum tree beside the fence, made her
shudder, because the bird's soulless cachinnation seemed an echo of
Colin's laugh.

Ah! that was the bush, undivested of romance--hard, brutal, vindictive,
in spite of the mocking verdure of her honeymoon spring.... And Colin
was a part of the Bush. He resembled it. He too could be strong and
sweet and tender as the great blossoming white cedar down by the
lagoon, as rills of running water maki