Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/13

 I. THE REASON

LL Australia. All of the best you have seen or read, or remember of it; of what has been written about it by its own sons and in Australia. And a timber-cutter's camp just within the blazing, blinding, humming, waving, shimmering and pulsating great dusty and gritty heart of it. Tents about, seeming only not to blaze off like so much paper, and bough cook's-shed at the junction of two lanes of piled cut scrub. A sky darkened and dusky and lowering with drought haze and a boiled sun steaming in the centre of it. A heat that blinds to darkness with perspiration and chills momentarily and frightens men. "God Forgive Billy" was in a bad way. He had a touch of the "dry 'orrers," as One-Eyed-Bogan said, who had had great experience with the "Horrors," both with his own and his mates', and dry and otherwise. When the men came they found no dinner ready, and they found Billy sitting in the dust and ashes of his "floor," his back propped against an upright of the shed, a bucket half full of potatoes between his legs, and a butcher's knife held loosely in Rh