y have you
been so long in coming? I thought you had forgotten."

"You sent me away the day I came, and they said----"

"Tony!"

She raised her head as she spoke, and looked at him with eyes full of
deep reproach.

"I hardly cared for anything then," he said.

"Tony, I never meant that," she answered. "You rode off, and I
thought----I'm so sorry, Tony."

The voice of the blind woman interrupted them.

"Where is he? Where is he? Why doesn't he come?" she said plaintively.

"Oh, Tony, I forgot," Ailleen exclaimed, as she loosened her arms. "Let
me go to her."

"And where's Slaughter?" Tony cried, coming back from the clouds of
happiness to the reality of their situation to discover that he only had
returned to the station.

He hurried round to the other side of the house. The ground was black,
with small wisps of smoke rising here and there for a considerable
distance away, while a hundred yards off he saw an undefined heap lying.
The sight of it made him shudder, and he rushed over to it, fearing what
he dared not think.

It was Slaughter, senseless, with blackened face and singed hair, lying
where he fell when the flames swept up around him and the smoke rolled
over him, shutting him off from escape and filling his lungs till he was
overcome.

Tony seized him by the shoulders, and, half carrying, half dragging him,
succeeded in getting him to the house. Ailleen, seeing him coming, met
him with some water, and between them they bathed his head and hands
until there was some sign of returning vitality. But consciousness was
longer in reviving, and Slaughter still lay insensible when a rescue
party from the men who were fighting the fires pressed through the lines
and reached Barellan.

For many days after Slaughter lay ill, almost at death's door, to the
sorrow and anxiety of Birralong; for the nightly gatherings at Marmot's
temporary store had much food for reflection in the knowledge which came
to them after the days of the great bush fire.

The charred ruins of the Three-mile, and the shallow waterhole beside
the hut, revealed enough to put to shame the scandal that had been laid
on Slaughter's shoulders, and for that alone Birralong, collectively,
acknowledged the blame of a grievous fault. But there was more than mere
acknowledgment of error needed to balance accounts. The fire that Tony
lit in the grass at Barellan would have been of no value in saving the
station had not another been lit farther