amed along the fences; or to hold
it as it blazed out in a raging fury where a spark fell upon the
inflammable foliage of the gums. Boughs stripped from saplings; sacks
tied to long, thin sticks; even the coats off their backs,--were the
weapons used in the fight; for unless the enemy were defeated at the
outset, a smoking waste of charred desolation would be all that there
was of Birralong and the district when again the sun came up.

But the fight was won, and when dawn came it only showed the heap of
wood ash and twisted sheets of galvanized iron--which was all that
remained of Marmot's store--and streaks of black running out into the
paddock beyond and along the fences, with now and again a tree either
leafless and charred, or with the leaves brown and scorched, showing
where the fire had for a moment obtained a footing and striven to gain a
hold, from whence it could spread in every direction, to reap, with its
sickles of flame, the rich harvest in a wild, unrestrained orgy and
blast, not only Nature's, but man's, handiwork into a dreary sadness of
blackened desolation. The men, having won, went back to the Rest, with
their throats parched and aching, their eyes smarting from the smoke and
the dust, and their skins grimed and clammy.

"It's a bad job for me," Marmot exclaimed, when, with the trouble in
their throats removed, the men reassembled at the Rest, where Peters and
Tony and Morton had already returned; "it's a bad job for me, but it's
nothing to what would have been if the blaze had got away. A bush fire
in the district now would be ruin, black, staring ruin, to every one,
and death to many."

"Ay, that it would," a selector, from ten miles out, answered. "It's
what we are all afraid of now. A bush fire with the country like it is
would go over five hundred square miles, and there wouldn't be a
selector nor a squatter for miles round with a yard of fence nor a blade
of grass to call his own."

"That's true," Marmot said. "And it's why I feel glad we held it. Though
it's bad enough for me, for it leaves me a poor man."

"Not much," Peters exclaimed. "You're all right. You set us up with
stores when we were broke, and now we've the chance we'll see you
through."

"Seeing that the gold we brought in was probably the cause of all the
trouble," Tony said.

"I don't know, lad; I don't know," Marmot replied. "How could any one
but us know it was there?"

"Yes; how could they?" Peters echoed. "Only they