“Where, then, did you camp last night?” Fisher asked.

“Me! I camped in the Carie lock-up. They wouldn’t let me camp in the stables behind the pub, so Iarst the constable to let me camp in the jail. That’s about the safest place I know.”

Fisher added tea to the water boiling in his billy. To the old man he appeared to be unreasonably calm.

“I’m telling you not to camp at Catfish Hole, oranywheres outside Carie.”

“Ah, yes! Thank you for the warning. I will certainly remember it. It all sounds a little unhealthy.”

“Unhealthy! Too right it’s unhealthy. Itain’t healthy to be strangled, is it?”

Although the subject was of absorbing interest to the old man, it was not unduly protracted. It was difficult, for one thing, to talk when sand-laden air and flies competed in entry to one’s mouth. The two men parted after the most casual of nods and immediately each was swallowed by the sweeping sand waves.

Joe Fisher was of medium height, slight of frame and yet strong, steady on his feet despite the buffeting of the wind. Like a man long used to the track he carried his swag of blankets and spare clothing within a sheet of stout unbleached calico. The small canvas water-bag gripped by his right hand was stained red by the oozing moisture, and, as the billy was strapped to the swag, his left hand was free to battle constantly with the flies. His face and bare arms were caked by the sand grains. His face and hair below the rim of the old felt hat were dyed a light red. Only the blue of his eyes defied the red fog.

There was a hint of grim tenacity in the dim picture of the shadowy man’s determined tramp northward in such bad weather. He could have found shelter, but no comfort, in the lee of the fence, but methodically and at even pace he passed along the track which now did not reveal wheel-tracks; not even those of the car he had recently met.