Page:Hornung - Irralies Bushranger.djvu/160

 you know how!" Dawson growled, but threw a handful of tea into the can as the water broke out in bubbles; and Irralie watched him from her seat beside the fire. He refused to look at her. His fece was as dark as aloes against its mat of iron-gray hair; his expression as bitter.

While the tea drew, Stingaree took Howie aside. They whispered together at the door, and the coarse, big man in the fine, tight collar and clothes, and the little whiskered dandy—all weapons and jewels—made a quaint pair, framed in the doorway, touched on one side by the warm fire-light, and on the other by that of the raw red east. Fullarton never forgot them. But Irralie, after failing in all her efforts to catch the deaf man's sullen eye, was comparing Fullarton and Stingaree. And here the contrast was the more remarkable in that both had good looks; yet the ready, energetic, strutting bantam of a man was not only a stronger figure than his heedless, indolent, hare-brained captive; he looked