he was doing her best and racing her hardest, she
suddenly started forward, like a cable tram gliding along on its own and
the grip put on suddenly. It was just what she'd do when I'd be riding
alone and a strange horse drew up from behind--the old racing instinct.
I FELT the thing too! I felt as if a strange horse WAS there! And
then--the words just jerked out of me by sheer funk--I started saying,
'Death is riding to-night!... Death is racing to-night!... Death is
riding to-night!' till the hoofs took that up. And I believe the old
mare felt the black horse at her side and was going to beat him or break
her heart.

I was mad with anxiety and fright: I remember I kept saying, 'I'll be
kinder to Mary after this! I'll take more notice of Jim!' and the rest
of it.

I don't know how the old mare got up the last 'pinch'. She must have
slackened pace, but I never noticed it: I just held Jim up to me and
gripped the saddle with my knees--I remember the saddle jerked from the
desperate jumps of her till I thought the girth would go. We topped the
gap and were going down into a gully they called Dead Man's Hollow, and
there, at the back of a ghostly clearing that opened from the road
where there were some black-soil springs, was a long, low, oblong
weatherboard-and-shingle building, with blind, broken windows in the
gable-ends, and a wide steep verandah roof slanting down almost to the
level of the window-sills--there was something sinister about it, I
thought--like the hat of a jail-bird slouched over his eyes. The place
looked both deserted and haunted. I saw no light, but that was because
of the moonlight outside. The mare turned in at the corner of the
clearing to take a short cut to the shanty, and, as she struggled across
some marshy ground, my heart kept jerking out the words, 'It's deserted!
They've gone away! It's deserted!' The mare went round to the back and
pulled up between the back door and a big bark-and-slab kitchen. Some
one shouted from inside--

'Who's there?'

'It's me. Joe Wilson. I want your sister-in-law--I've got the boy--he's
sick and dying!'

Brighten came out, pulling up his moleskins. 'What boy?' he asked.

'Here, take him,' I shouted, 'and let me get down.'

'What's the matter with him?' asked Brighten, and he seemed to hang
back. And just as I made to get my leg over the saddle, Jim's head went
back over my arm, he stiffened, and I saw his eyeballs turned up and
glistening in the moonlight