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A swagman had happened to call at the station that morning; he asked for work and then for tucker. He irritated Wall, who told him to clear out. It was the first time that a swagman had been turned away from the station without tucker.

Swaggy went along the track some miles, brooding over his wrongs, and crossed Sandy Creek. He struck a match and dropped it into a convenient tuft of grass in a likely patch of tufts, with dead grass running from it up into the scrubby ridges–then he hurried on.

Did you ever see a bush-fire? Not sheets of flame sweeping and roaring from tree-top to tree-top, but the snaky, hissing grass-fire of hardwood country.

The whole country covered with thin blue smoke so that you never know in what direction the fire is travelling. At night you see it like the lighted streets of cities, in the distant ranges. It roars up the hollows of dead trees and gives them the appearance of factory chimneys in the dusk. It climbs, by shreds of bark, the trunks of old dead white-box and blue-gums–solid and hard as cast-iron–and cuts off the limbs. And where there’s a piece of recently ringbarked country, with the dead leaves still on the trees, the fire will roar from bough to bough–a fair imitation of a softwood forest fire. The bush-fire travels through the scrubs for hundreds of miles, taking the grass to the roots, scorching the living bush but leaving it alive–for gumbush is hardest of any to kill. Where there is no undergrowth, and the country seems bare as a road for miles, the fire will cross, licking up invisible straws of grass, dusty leaves, twigs and shreds of bark on the hard ground already baking in the drought. You hear of a fire miles away, and next day, riding across the head of a gully, you hear a hissing and crackling and there is the fire running over the ground in lines and curves of thin blue smoke, snakelike, with old logs blazing on the blackened ground behind. Did you ever hear a fire where a fire should not be? There is something hellish in the sound of it. When the breeze is, say, from the east the fire runs round western spurs, up sheltered gullies–helped by an “eddy” in the wind perhaps–and appears along the top of the ridge, ready, with a change in the wind, to come down on farms and fields of ripe wheat, with a “front” miles long.

A selector might be protected by a wide sandy creek in front and wide cleared roads behind, and, any hour in the day or night, a shout from the farther end of the wheat paddock, and–“Oh, my God! the wheat!”

Wall didn’t mind this fire much; most of his sheep were on their way out back, to a back run where there was young grass; and the dry ridges along the creek would be better for a burning-off–only he had to watch his fences.

But, about dusk, Mary came galloping home in her usual breakneck fashion.

“Father,” she cried, “turn out the men and send them at once. The fire is all down by Ross’s farm, and he has ten acres of wheat standing, and no one at home but him and Bob.”

“How do you know?” growled Wall. Then suddenly and suspiciously, “Have you been there?”

“I came home that way.”

“Well–let Ross look after his own,” snarled the father.

“But he can’t, father. They’re fighting the fire now, and they’ll be burnt out before the morning if they don’t get help–for God’s sake, father, act like a Christian and send the men. Remember it is Christmas-time, father. You’re surely not going to see a neighbour burnt out.”

“Yes, I am,” shouted Wall. “I’d like to see every selector in the country burnt out, hut and all! Get off that horse and go inside. If a man leaves the station to-night he needn’t come back.” (This last for the benefit of the men’s hut.)