ng the red mud of their
bottoms, and a bath became a luxury--or a penance--the scanty water
running thick and red. Then the bush caught fire and burnt for three
days, painting the sky a rusty brown, and making the air hard to
breathe. Of a morning his first act on going into his surgery was to
pick up the thermometer that stood on the table. Sure as fate, though
the clock had not long struck nine, the mercury marked something
between a hundred and a hundred and five degrees. He let it fall with a
nerveless gesture. Since his sunstroke he not only hated, he feared the
sun. But out into it he must, to drive through dust-clouds so opaque
that one could only draw rein till they subsided, meanwhile holloaing
off collisions. Under the close leather hood he sat and stifled; or,
removing his green goggles for the fiftieth time, climbed down to enter
yet another baked wooden house, where he handled prostrate bodies rank
with sweat, or prescribed for pallid or fever-speckled children. Then
home, to toy with the food set before him, his mind already running on
the discomforts of the afternoon.--Two bits of ill-luck came his way
this summer. Old Ocock fell, in dismounting from a vehicle, and
sustained a compound fracture of the femur. Owing to his advanced age
there was for a time fear of malunion of the parts, and this kept
Mahony on the rack. Secondly, a near neighbour, a common little fellow
who kept a jeweller's shop in Bridge Street, actually took the plunge:
sold off one fine day and sailed for home. And this seemed the
unkindest cut of all.

But the accident that gave the death-blow to his scruples was another.
On the advice of a wealthy publican he was treating, whose judgment he
trusted, Mahony had invested--heavily for him, selling off other stock
to do it--in a company known as the Hodderburn Estate. This was a
government affair and ought to have been beyond reproach. One day,
however, it was found that the official reports of the work done by the
diamond drill-bore were cooked documents; and instantly every one
connected with the mine--directors, managers, engineers--lay under the
suspicion of fraudulent dealings. Shares had risen as high as ten
pounds odd; but when the drive reached the bore and, in place of the
deep gutter-ground the public had been led to expect, hard rock was
found overhead, there was a panic; shares dropped to twenty-five
shillings and did not rally. Mahony was a loser by six hundred pounds,
and g