Page:Hornung - Irralies Bushranger.djvu/104

 it she could see no other building. But an inner door opened into a tiny lobby, which let one in or out through a shallow veranda abutting the yard. From this veranda one had all the homestead buildings under one's eye: the kitchen opposite, the long main building to the left, and to the right the blacksmith's forge and the iron-store. The two last were twin structures entirely composed of sheets of corrugated iron either nailed to uprights or clamped together with bolts and nuts. The store was the nearer to the school-room block, and in front of it, with a pipe in his mouth and a repeating-rifle under his arm, stood George Young on guard in the moonlight.

Irralie watched him from the shallow veranda, for which she presently forsook her school-room door. The veranda was in deep shadow, and she stood unobserved within ten paces of Young. His head was bent and his shoulders rounded. He looked a man dejected rather than alert, and the girl wondered whether he was thinking of