suggestion, but something held me
silent, and instead I dropped down on my knees and felt feverishly in
the undergrowth. Of course it was a silly thing to do--there might have
been snakes and all manner of noxious crawling things there--but I
didn't think of that at the time. I was too intent on solving the
riddle. My hand touched something.... I straightened up and faced the
others.

"Moira and Cumshaw," I said. "I've found the hut. That's a piece of it
there." Bending down, I dragged to light a rough-hewn beam that possibly
had been the threshold plank. It was weather-worn, and in places the
fungus had grown thickly on it; but I could see for all that that it had
been warped and twisted and charred in the blaze of a fire. Three pairs
of eyes met across the plank, and three lips put the same idea into
words.

"There's been a fire here," we said in chorus.

"And that," I added on my own account, for the benefit of the others who
had not jumped to the same conclusion as I had, "and that explains
everything that's puzzled us since we entered the valley. There's been a
bush fire here at some period during the last twenty years. It destroyed
the hut, it burnt down the wood, and it made that pile of lime you
found, Cumshaw."

"What pile was that?" Moira queried quickly. "I didn't see any."

"Mr. Cumshaw passed a pile in the bushes as we came along," I said
off-handedly. "The heat must have rendered the stones down."

She accepted my explanation at its face value.

"No wonder the place remained hidden," I ran on. "If you'll look over
east, where there should be a lone tree, you won't find any. It's wattle
everywhere you look. The fire cleared out all the trees and forced the
wattle on in their place. If you came by here on any side but the one we
came by you'd take this to be just an ordinary hollow full of wattle."

"You're talking nothing else but wattle," Cumshaw interrupted. "What has
the wattle to do with the fire anyway?"

"Why, don't you see?" I cried. "Without the fire there wouldn't have
been any wattle here. The seed'll lie dormant in the ground for years
sometimes; it takes great heat to germinate them. That's why wattle
always springs up in profusion after there's been a bush fire. The same
thing happens with grass, the coarser kinds, though to a lesser extent."

"I see," he said gravely. "It means that we are back just where we
began."

"It doesn't mean anything of the sort," I said quickly. "All th