said. “Why don’t you take it easy, man, and let someone else have a buck at them?”
“I told Conroy I’d be back. I don’t break my word if—if I can help it.”
“Well, you can’t help this. You———”
“Don’t talk rot,” said Randal, roughly. “Do you think I’d take it on if I thought I was going to peter out and mess things up? A man knows what he can do, and what he can’t. Or if he doesn’t he ought to.”
To the break in his voice Murray gave a pitiful silence, and slowly the day came: not flushing with girlish shyness as she comes to dimpled valleys and homesteads, but standing grave and beautiful on the mountains, to press wreaths of blood-red thorns down on their snow, and to fling her great javelins of light from pinnacle to jagged scarp and bowed bared shoulder of flint.
The tussock deeps either side the saddle lay naked as an unseen hand swept the white mists out of them, and the very faint sound of sheep cropping grass came up through the new-made air. And the sunlight burst up the gullies, and along the hundred-foot river banks, striking their clay to beaten bronze, and chasing a riot of onyx and jasper and hyacinth-blue from bluff up to reaching bluff until all the western sky was laughing with it.
Murray pulled slow for the ford, and a little black-and-white stilt darted away from under
