staggered towards it. Every second the
heat was more intense, the smoke-laden air more stifling, and at the
edge of the pool he swayed, even the strength born of his fear deserting
him. With a wild, hopeless cry he fell forward into the water, and
floundered towards the middle of the fence which Slaughter had built
across it. As he reached the middle, breathless and exhausted with fear
and the strain of Nellie's weight, a line of flame darted through the
grass at the side of the track, and sprang, like a snake, up the wall
of the hut, writhing out over the dried sheets of bark of the roof as,
with a roar, the whole burst into flame. Other flames leaped out along
the line of the fence; the heat came upon him with such fierceness that
he felt his skin blister and crack; the smoke entered his lungs and made
him choke as though a cord were tied tight round his throat, and with a
glimpse of Nellie's face, upturned as her arms relaxed and she slipped
down under the water, Dickson fell senseless across the rail of the
fence.

CHAPTER XX.

THE LAST LOOP.

At noon Ailleen, sitting on the verandah of Barellan, caught the scent
of bush-fire smoke floating on the faint breeze. She rose and walked to
the end of the verandah, where she could obtain a view in the direction
whence the wind was blowing. Over the tops of the trees she saw smoke
rising rapidly. Even as she stood she saw fresh columns spring up as
though fires were being set alight at intervals all along the sky-line
to windward. At first it rose in well-defined columns, straight up in
the air, with such regularity that it seemed to be floating upwards to
the faultless blue of the heavens from numberless sacrificial altars--as
though it were the token of sacrifice offered by the drought-stricken
earth to the pitiless sky above; a token of supplication from dumb,
inarticulate Nature to the gods of the thunder-cloud and the rulers of
the rain-mist, in pleading that the bonds which held back the tribute of
the season might be freed and the thirst of the parched earth quenched.

But soon the columns were broken, soon the order was disorganized, as
the smoke, fanned by the winds set up by heat below, swirled and
twisted and changed into rolling clouds without form or
regularity--clouds which massed together and formed into heavy banks
that marred the clearness of the skies. The fringe, formed of the
lighter vapour, floated over the trees, and drifted on the breeze