, when fired at, will sometimes stand watching the smoke. Job's
leg was smashed badly, and the pain must have been terrible. But he
thought then with a flash, as men do in a fix. No doubt the scene at
the lonely Bush home of his boyhood started up before him: his father's
horse appeared riderless, and he saw the look in his mother's eyes.

Now a Bushman's first, best, and quickest chance in a fix like this is
that his horse go home riderless, the home be alarmed, and the horse's
tracks followed back to him; otherwise he might lie there for days, for
weeks--till the growing grass buries his mouldering bones. Job was on an
old sheep-track across a flat where few might have occasion to come for
months, but he did not consider this. He crawled to his gun, then to a
log, dragging gun and smashed leg after him. How he did it he doesn't
know. Half-lying on one side, he rested the barrel on the log, took aim
at the filly, pulled both triggers, and then fell over and lay with his
head against the log; and the gun-barrel, sliding down, rested on his
neck. He had fainted. The crows were interested, and the ants would come
by-and-by.

Now Doc. Wild had inspirations; anyway, he did things which seemed,
after they were done, to have been suggested by inspiration and in no
other possible way. He often turned up where and when he was wanted
above all men, and at no other time. He had gipsy blood, they said; but,
anyway, being the mystery he was, and having the face he had, and living
the life he lived--and doing the things he did--it was quite probable
that he was more nearly in touch than we with that awful invisible world
all round and between us, of which we only see distorted faces and hear
disjointed utterances when we are 'suffering a recovery'--or going mad.

On the morning of Job's accident, and after a long brooding silence,
Doc. Wild suddenly said to Mac. Falconer--

'Git the hosses, Mac. We'll go to the station.'

Mac., used to the doctor's eccentricities, went to see about the horses.

And then who should drive up but Mrs Spencer--Job's mother-in-law--on
her way from the town to the station. She stayed to have a cup of tea
and give her horses a feed. She was square-faced, and considered a
rather hard and practical woman, but she had plenty of solid flesh, good
sympathetic common-sense, and deep-set humorous blue eyes. She lived
in the town comfortably on the interest of some money which her husband
left in the bank.