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HEY made camp that night in a murmurous pine grove close to the edge of a small cypress swamp. It was dim dusk when they halted. Only the pallid radiance of the moon and the flickering glare of the cook-fires lit the grove while the little tents were being pitched. Jolie stood apart from the others, watching the men at their work, dulling her ears as best she could to the oaths with which Jock Pearson larded his orders to the pack-horse drivers upon whom fell all the heavy labour of the camp.

The anger in her swelled higher. Lachlan, she thought, might have bade Pearson control his language out of respect for her. But Lachlan seemed to have forgotten her existence. He was busy with the horses. Almayne was sitting cross-legged on the grass, tinkering with his rifle. Mr. O'Sullivan stood talking with Meg Pearson beside a fire where a haunch of venison was already roasting. Presently, sickened by Jock's blasphemies, the like of which she had never imagined, Jolie wandered away along a moonlit glade sloping down towards the swamp.

At the end of this glade, scarcely fifty yards from the nearest of the cook-fires, the moss-bannered cypresses of the swamp soared straight and tall into