low. The fluming straddled swamps and little gullies and worked-out mining country. The big two-mile flume was strong. Ormond had given it all his spare time for a year past. And Paddy’s Gully flume was strong, for it had been renewed in the last three months. Ormond could trust them to carry the first of the rush—the half—possibly the whole. And this meant more than his nerve dared face. It meant the swamping and buckling of the slighter fluming near the claim. It meant the choking and wrenching apart of the two miles of pipes, and the driving of them into the paddock bottom with a welter of broken jets, boxes, connections. It meant the death of the Lion.
The sleet whipped Ormond’s ears; the near hills rocked and changed shape as the storm lightened and rose again. He slewed from the track to drive the roan pony into a mad little mountain river that rolled boulders at him and smelt of new-wet earth. This cut off five miles, and bruised his shin badly on a sharp rock. The rain pelted like steel knitting needles, and the pony’s steady scramble flagged slightly. Here was no track, and the footway spread cruelly uncertain. But the knobs and spurs and gullies through which the Lion race took its way down the mountain drew Ormond forward, unswerving, where the windy wrack drove.
