tion at gaze. But thrice was Lou tempted far up on the naked shoulder of the Brothers. For the sun burnt on the black rotten rocks and the stiff tufts of heather and the savage brown thistle between; and the sparkle of a creek in cool fern, seven miles off as the foot must go, was a torment that dried his tongue in his mouth. His flask was empty long since. But he up-ended it again before putting it away with his untasted lunch. Then he dropped under shelter of a bull-nosed scarp, and lay there.
“And if the sheep get back on me I won’t be the only one who mucks things this day,” he said.
Below and before him his dogs ranged wide, harrying little mobs that ran together and trickled forward like spilt coffee from a cup. Very far down a trained eye might pick up occasional flickers of life on the heat-run flanges. There lay Conlon’s beat where he kept touch with the man below, even as, on terrace and jagged terrace above, Mogger and nine more held the linked chain unbroken until it touched down to the bush-gully on the farther side. The heat turned Lou’s bones to water; and all the wonder of heliotrope and violent purple in the gullies, and saffron on the spurs, and flashing diamond where distant waterfalls leapt in fern, were things of emptiness and derision. He lay on his face with his eyes shut, and cared
