.

"Yes, Harry."

"Then jump up here."

Harry was good-natured and would give anybody a lift if he could.

Old Jack climbed up on the box-seat, between Harry and the traveller,
who grew rather more stand--(or rather _sit_) offish, wrapped himself
closer in his overcoat, and buttoned his cloak of silence and general
disgust to the chin button. Old Jack got his pipe to work and grunted,
and chatted, and exchanged bush compliments with Harry comfortably. And
so on to where they saw the light of a fire outside a hut ahead.

"Let me down here, Harry," said Old Jack uneasily, "I owe Mother Mac
fourteen shillings for drinks, and I haven't got it on me, and I've been
on the spree back yonder, and she'll know it, an' I don't want to face
her. I'll cut across through the paddock and you can pick me up on the
other side."

Harry thought a moment.

"Sit still, Jack," he said. "I'll fix that all right."

He twisted and went down into his trouser-pocket, the reins in one hand,
and brought up a handful of silver. He held his hand down to the coach
lamp, separated some of the silver from the rest by a sort of sleight
of hand--or rather sleight of fingers--and handed the fourteen shillings
over to Old Jack.

"Here y'are, Jack. Pay me some other time."

"Thanks, Harry!" grunted Old Jack, as he twisted for his pocket.

It was a cold night, the hint of a possible shanty thawed the traveller
a bit, and he relaxed with a couple of grunts about the weather and the
road, which were received in a brotherly spirit. Harry's horses
stopped of their own accord in front of the house, an old bark-and-slab
whitewashed humpy of the early settlers' farmhouse type, with a plank
door in the middle, one bleary-lighted window on one side, and one
forbiddingly blind one, as if death were there, on the other. It might
have been. The door opened, letting out a flood of lamp-light and
firelight which blindly showed the sides of the coach and the near pole
horse and threw the coach lamps and the rest into the outer darkness of
the opposing bush.

"Is that you, Harry?" called a voice and tone like Mrs Warren's of the
Profession.

"It's me."

A stoutly aggressive woman appeared. She was rather florid, and looked,
moved and spoke as if she had been something in the city in other years,
and had been dumped down in the bush to make money in mysterious ways;
had married, mated--or got herself to be supposed to be married--for
convenience, and cont