When McNab awakened in the morning, he realised that his sleep had been too heavy for him to know what had happened during the night, and that much might have occurred while he was snoring.

Farrel found him snapping and biting like a trapped dingo. His voice rasped; his inquisitive, suspicious eyes were everywhere. But the Schoolmaster had none of the air of a victorious gamester, and Deirdre's amiability was of a pattern with what he had imagined it the night before. He had heard Davey and Conal ride out at dawn with a cracking of whips and yelping of dogs to wake the saints. That seemed to negative the suggestion that they had been out all night. They were going to muster a couple of hundred of Maitland's cattle in some paddocks near Red Creek, he remembered the Schoolmaster had said.

Yet by the cold light of early morning, he had an unaccountable sensation of having been tricked. What with the girl's smiles and Steve's grog he had not been as wide awake as he had intended to be, he knew. Farrel's readiness to consider the school proposition irritated him. It had been a pretext; his only anxiety was not to discuss it any more. He was all fret and fume to get back to the Wirree. Nothing would stay him.

When he was up in his high-seated spring-cart, there was none of the complaisant geniality of the night before about him. He gathered up his reins with a sour smile at the little group assembled on Steve's verandah and drove out of sight at a jolting jog-trot.

"The boys got the mob?" Steve asked anxiously.

The Schoolmaster took off his hat with a sigh.

"Had the time of their lives!" he exclaimed. "It was a big mob—rolling fat."

Deirdre's eyes were still on the track down which McNab had gone to the Wirree.

"I won't say good-bye, Deirdre," he had said, as his eyes rested on her for a moment. "I'll be seein' you again soon."

There had been something in the nature of a promise—or a threat—in his eyes.

"There was no time to fix brands," the Schoolmaster was telling Steve. "Conal's running these with a couple of score of Maitland's store beasts. Drafted out about fifty calves, clear skins and a couple of dozen cows, put them into the Narrow Valley run—wants to do some branding when he gets back. I thought he ought to let them go with the half-dozen scrubbers turned back to the bush, but he wouldn't have it; says he can take them along, branded, with Maitland's next bunch."

"It's a bit risky leavin' them there."

Steve's glance wandered in the direction of the valley lying to the westward between the last line of hills that shut the shanty in from the long roll of inland plains.

"It's a bit risky," he repeated. "But Conal knows his business. It'll be all right, I suppose. There's nobody goes Narrow Valley way but Cameron's men, and they're not likely to be going this time of the year—seeing the rains are due. Conal had a look at the fences when he was up a couple of days ago, didn't he? Though fences aren't much good. Seen a wild cow fly like a bird when she wants to. Good thing Conal got away before the rains, Dan. If the rivers were down he'd never've got through."

"Yes," said the Schoolmaster. "It was a case of now or never."

"And, after all," he added gravely, putting his arm out and drawing her to him, "it was Deirdre saved the situation. But I wouldn't have you do what you did again, dear, not for all the cattle in the world, nor all the money in it."

She clung to him.

"And I wouldn't do it," she sobbed, breathlessly.