s
was still burning. Presently Miss Flipp put it out, and closing her
door after her, stealthily made her way from the house. She trod
cautiously and noiselessly, but her gown caught on the lower sprouts
of the ragged old rose-bushes beside the walks, and though she took a
long time to open the little gate opening towards the wharves and the
narrow pathway running along the river-bank to the bridge, it creaked
a little on its rusty hinges, so that I heard it and fell to awaiting
the girl's return.

I waited and waited, and beguiled the time by counting the trains that
passed with the quarter hours. There were so many that I soon lost
count. This line carried goods to the great wheat and wool-growing
west and brought its produce to the city. Many of the noisy trains
were laden with "fifteen hundred" and "two thousand" lots of "fats,"
and the yearly statistics dealing with the sales at Homebush
chronicled their total numbers as millions. From beyond Forbes,
Bourke, and Brewarrina they came in trucks to cross the bridge
spanning the noble stream at the mountain's base, but they never went
back again to the great plains where they had basked in plenty or
staggered through droughts as the fickle seasons rose and fell. The
voracious, insatiable maw of the city was a grave for them all, and
the commercial greed which falls so heavily on the poor dumb beasts in
which it traffics, caged them so tightly for their last journey that
by the time they reached Noonoon they were bruised and cramped and not
a few trodden under foot. The empty trucks going west again made the
longest trains, as they could be laden with nothing but a little
wire-netting for settlers who were fighting the rabbits, and were
easily distinguishable from other "goods," as when they clumsily and
jerkily halted the clanking of their couplings and the bumping of
their buffers could be heard for a mile or more down the valley. The
splendid atmosphere intensified all sounds and carried them an unusual
distance, and many a time at first I was wont to be aroused from sleep
in the night with a notion that the thundering trains were going to
run right over the house.

On the night in question I had not heard Miss Flipp return from her
midnight tryst, though all the luggage trains had passed and it neared
the time of the first division of the up or citywards mail from the
west, which was the earliest train to arrive in town from the country
daily. It passed Noonoon i