and starts, the sleep of exhaustion,
and start up half laughing and happy, to be stricken wild-eyed the next
moment by terrible reality. Some couldn't realize it at all--and to most
of them all things were very dreamy, unreal and far away on that lonely,
silent road in the moonlight--silent save for the slow, stumbling hoofs
of tired horses, and the deliberate, half-hesitating clack-clack of
wheel-boxes on the axles.

Ben Duggan rode hard, as grief-stricken men ride--and walk. At Cooyal he
woke up the solitary storekeeper and told him the news; then along that
little-used old road for some miles both ways, and back again, rousing
prospectors and fossickers, the butcher of the neighbourhood, clearers,
fencers, and timber-getters, in hut and tent.

"Who's that?"

"What's up?"

"What's the matter?"

"Ben Duggan! Jack Denver's dead! Killed ridin' home from the races!
Funeral's to-morrow. Roll up at Talbragar or the nearest point you can
get to on the government road. Tell the neighbours and folks."

"Good God! How did it happen?"

But the hoofs of Ben's horse would be clattering or thudding away into
the distance.

He struck through to Dunne's selection--his brother-in-law, who had not
been to the races; then to Ross's farm--Old Ross was against racing, but
struck a match at once and said something to his auld wife about them
black trousers that belonged to the black coat and vest.

Then Ben swung to the left and round behind the spurs to the school
at Old Pipeclay, where he told the schoolmaster. Then west again to
Morris's and Schneider's lonely farms in the deep estuary of Long Gully,
and through the gully to the Mudgee-Gulgong road at New Pipeclay. The
long, dark, sullenly-brooding gully through which he had gone to school
in the glorious bush sunshine with Jack Denver, and his sweetheart--now
but three hours his hopelessly-stricken widow; Bertha Lambert, Ben's
sweetheart--married now, and newly a grandmother; Harry Dale--drowned
in the Lachlan; Lucy Brown--Harry's school-day and boy-and-girl
sweetheart--dead; and--and all the rest of them. Far away, far away--and
near away: up in Queensland and out on the wastes of the Never-Never.
Riding and camping, hardship and comfort, monotony and adventure,
drought, flood, blacks, and fire; sprees and--the rest of it. Long dry
stretches on Dead Man's Track. Cutting across the country in No Man's
Land where there were no tracks into the Unknown. Chancing it and
damning