“You are a bit of an old worry pot, aren’t you? The fact is that you have been too closely associated with the blacks, especially the lubras, and have borrowed much of their belief in the supernatural. Because poor dad failed to come home one night, you needs must imagine that I won’t turn up. It’s piffle when you come to think of it, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m home safe and sound, and it’s raining good and hard and looks like raining all night, and perhaps it will rain for a week and we’ll have feed and water for years. I don’t see anything to worry about, but everything to dance about.”

He opened the wicket gate for her and she hurried on into the house to look to the dinner, the fire, and then to take up airing underclothes and lay them on his bed beside his second best trousers and coat. She was humming a little tune as she passed back again to the kitchen, but the humming gave place to a cry of concern when she saw on John’s throat a wide bluish mark.

“It’s nothing, and it doesn’t hurt,” he quickly told her. “I was riding under a mulga-tree in the dark when a low branch gave me a knock. There’s no damage done, so don’t worry about it or I’ll have to take you in hand and talk to you seriously for being a bad woman. Now, what’s for dinner? I’m hungry. And here’s Jimmy Partner.”

The cloud in her big eyes passed, but she followed him with a bottle ofembrocation, to fuss about him until he applied some of it to the bluish mark.

When they sat down to dinner it was still raining.

Chapter Two

The Bush Takes a Man

BILL THE BETTER began his day’s work at seven in the morning when he rode out into the horse paddock to bring in the working hacks for the stockmen stationed at the homestead of the great Karwir cattle station.

He was a shrimp of a man, this Bill the Better. Scanty hair failed to cover a cranium that would have delighted Cesare Lombroso who, it will be remembered, determined criminals by their heads. A long nose appeared to divide the gingery moustache which he constantly pulled down by the ends, and watery blue eyes invariably contained an expression of great hope of a brighter future.