be done by the art of man.

We went up Nulla Mountain the same way as we remembered doing when Jim
and I rode to meet father that time he had the lot of weaners. We kept
wide and didn't follow on after one another so as to make a marked
trail. It was a long, dark, dreary ride. We had to look sharp so as not
to get dragged off by a breast-high bough in the thick country. There
was no fetching a doctor if any one was hurt. Father rode ahead. He knew
the ins and outs of the road better than any of us, though Jim, who had
lived most of his time in the Hollow after he got away from the
police, was getting to know it pretty well. We were obliged to go slow
mostly--for a good deal of the track lay along the bed of a creek, full
of boulders and rocks, that we had to cross ever so many times in a
mile. The sharp-edged rocks, too, overhung low enough to knock your
brains out if you didn't mind.

It was far into the night when we got to the old yard. There it stood,
just as I recollect seeing it the time Jim and I and father branded the
weaners. It had only been used once or twice since. It was patched up a
bit in places, but nobody seemed to have gone next or nigh it for a long
time. The grass had grown up round the sliprails; it was as strange and
forsaken-looking as if it belonged to a deserted station.

As we rode up a man comes out from an angle of the fence and gives a
whistle. We knew, almost without looking, that it was Warrigal. He'd
come there to meet Starlight and take him round some other way. Every
track and short cut there was in the mountains was as easy to him as
the road to George Storefield's was to us. Nulla Mountain was full of
curious gullies and caves and places that the devil himself could hardly
have run a man to ground in, unless he'd lived near it all his life as
Warrigal had. He wasn't very free in showing them to us, but he'd have
made a bridge of his own body any time to let Starlight go safe. So when
they rode away together we knew he was safe whoever might be after us,
and that we should see him in the Hollow some time next day.

We went on for a mile or two farther; then we got off, and turned our
horses loose. The rest of the way we had to do on foot. My horse and
Jim's had got regularly broke into Rocky Flat, and we knew that they'd
go home as sure as possible, not quite straight, but keeping somewhere
in the right direction. As for father he always used to keep a horse
or two, trained to go ho