are as they are between your father and mine. Now, that'll do.
Let me get on my horse, Bob. I'll be safer there."

"Why?" asked Bob.

"Come on, Bob, and don't be stupid."

She met him often and "liked" him.

III

A TRAMP'S MATCH AND WHAT IT DID

It was Christmas Eve at Wall's, but there was no score or so of buggies
and horses and dozens of strange dogs round the place as of old. The
glasses and decanters were dusty on the heavy old-fashioned sideboard in
the dining-room; and there was only a sullen, brooding man leaning over
the hurdles and looking at his rams in the yard, and a sullen, brooding
half-caste at work in the kitchen. Mary had ridden away that morning to
visit a girl chum.

It was towards the end of a long drought, and the country was like
tinder for hundreds of miles round--the ground for miles and miles in
the broiling scrubs "as bare as your hand," or covered with coarse, dry
tufts. There was feed grass in places, but you had to look close to see
it.

Shearing had finished the day before, but there was a black boy and
a station-hand or two about the yards and six or eight shearers and
rouseabouts, and a teamster camped in the men's huts--they were staying
over the holidays to shear stragglers and clean up generally. Old Peter
and a jackaroo were out on the run watching a bush-fire across Sandy
Creek.

A swagman had happened to call at the station that morning; he asked for
work and then for tucker. He irritated Wall, who told him to clear
out. It was the first time that a swagman had been turned away from the
station without tucker.

Swaggy went along the track some miles, brooding over his wrongs, and
crossed Sandy Creek. He struck a match and dropped it into a convenient
tuft of grass in a likely patch of tufts, with dead grass running from
it up into the scrubby ridges--then he hurried on.

Did you ever see a bush-fire? Not sheets of flame sweeping and roaring
from tree-top to tree-top, but the snaky, hissing grass-fire of hardwood
country.

The whole country covered with thin blue smoke so that you never know
in what direction the fire is travelling. At night you see it like
the lighted streets of cities, in the distant ranges. It roars up the
hollows of dead trees and gives them the appearance of factory chimneys
in the dusk. It climbs, by shreds of bark, the trunks of old dead
white-box and blue-gums--solid and hard as cast-iron--and cuts off the
limbs. And where there's a pi