\'Rum things happen in the bush, you take my word for it,\' suddenly broke out Dan M\'Elroy as we were sitting smoking round a camp fire, far back in the \'Never Never\' one night. The whole tract of country west of the Barcoo was under water that summer. We were all stuck hard and fast, about fifty miles from Sandringham, waiting for the creeks and cowalls to go down. They weren\'t small ones either—twenty feet deep in some places and half a mile wide. There were a dozen teamsters with wool-waggons, Jim and me and two black boys with four hundred head of fat cattle from Marndoo. A police trooper bringing down a horse-stealer for trial, committed by the Bench there, made up the party. The prisoner was made comfortable—only chained to a log for safety. Here we were, waiting, waiting, and had to make the best of it. We walked about in the daylight, and did a bit of shooting. We\'d put up a bough yard for the cattle, more for the exercise than anything else; and to make the time pass we\'d taken to telling yarns. Some of them were that curious I wish I hadn\'t forgotten \'em. But this one that Dan told that night I shall remember to my dying day. He was the mail contractor between St. George and Bolivar Run, a weather-beaten Bathurst native, as hard as iron-bark, who\'d have contracted to run the mail from the Red Sea to Jordan in spite of all the Arabs if they\'d made it worth his while. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. In his time he had been speared by blacks, shot at by bushrangers, fished for dead out of flooded creeks, besides being \'given up\' in fever, ague, and 183sunstroke in exploring of mail routes through the \'Never Never\' country. Hairbreadth escapes were daily bread to him. He seemed to thrive on \'em, but this one must have been out of the common way.

He looked round over the great plain, where we could see the glimmer of water on every side by the light of the low moon, just showing, red and goblin-like. A murmuring wind began to whisper and sob among the stunted myall, swaying the long streamers as if they were mourning for the dead. It felt colder, though we\'d piled up the logs on the fire lately, when he filled his pipe and said: \'We\'ll turn in after this, but you may as well take it to sleep on. It was nigh twenty year ago it happened, yet it comes back to me now as fresh as I saw it that cursed night. You chaps remember,\' he said, taking a good steady draw at his pipe, by way of starting it and the yarn at the same time,—\'you remember, as I told you, I was running a horse mail between Marlborough Point and Waranah, somewhere about \'68. A different season from this, I tell you. No rain for about eighteen months, and when the autumn came in dry, with the nights long and cold, the sheep began to die faster than you could count \'em. I had a fairish contract, and though the mail was a heavy one, I was able to manage it by riding one horse and leading a packer. A terrible long day\'s ride it was—three times a week—eighty-five mile. Of course I had a change of horses, but I didn\'t get in till eleven or twelve at night to Waranah. The frosty nights had set in, and sometimes, between being half-frozen and dead-tired, I could hardly sit on my horse. It was getting on in June, and still no rain, only the frosts getting sharper and sharper, when I came along to a sandhill by the side of a billabong of the Murrumbidgee, about ten miles from Waranah. There was a big water-hole there; it was a favourite camping place between the township and Baranco station. I was later than usual, and it was about midnight when I got to this point. Through a weak horse as had knocked up I\'d had to walk five miles. I was nigh perished with the cold; hungry too, for I\'d had no time to stop and get a feed; and as I\'d been in the saddle since long before daylight, you may guess I was pretty well tuckered out. A particular spot, too, when you come to think of it. The sand-ridge ran back from the water-hole a good way (there was a big kurrajong-tree beside it, I remember), and 184spread out near upon a mile till you got into a fair-sized plain. The ridge—that\'s the way of \'em in dry country—was covered as thick as they could stand with pine-scrub. An old cattle-track ran right through to the plain, where they used to come to water in the old days when Baranco was a cattle-run. I was dozing on my horse, dog-tired and stiff with the cold, when I came to the water-hole at the foot of this sandhill. I always used to pull up there and have a smoke; so I stopped and looked round about, in a half-sleepy, dazed kind of way. I felt for my box of matches, and I\'m dashed if they weren\'t gone—shot out, I expect—for I\'d been working my passage and been jumbled about more than enough. That put the cap on. I felt as if I\'d drop off the horse there and then. I never was one for drinking, and I didn\'t carry a flask. How I\'d get on the next couple of hours I couldn\'t think.

\'All of a sudden a streak of light came through the darkness of the pine-scrub to the left of me. It got broader and broader. It wasn\'t the moon, I knew, for that wouldn\'t show till nigh-hand daylight. It must be a fire. Somebody camping, of course; but why they didn\'t stop by the water, the regular place, with good feed and open ground all round them, I couldn\'t make out. I was off like a shot, and hung up my horses to the kurrajong tree, which stood handy. It was too thick to ride through the pine saplings, and I thought the walk would freshen me up. I started off quite jolly with the notion of the grand warm I should have at the fire, and the pipeful of baccy I\'d be able to borrow. It was a big fire I saw as I stumbled along, getting nearer and nearer the head of an old-man pine, the branches as dry as timber, and would burn like matchwood. I could see three men standing round it. As I got nearer I was just going to halloo out, partly for fun and partly for devilment, when the wind blew the flame round, and made one of the men, who was poking a pole into the fire, shift and turn his face towards me. Mind! I was in the dark shadow of the pines. The glare of the fire lit up his face and those of the two other men as clear as day.

\'The man\'s face, as it turned towards where I was standing, had such a hellish expression, that I stopped dead and drew behind an overhanging "balah" that grew among the pines. He seemed to be listening. Another man with an axe in his hand said something to him, when he walked a few steps down the 185track towards me and stopped. My God, what a face it was! No devil out of hell could have looked more fiendish than he did. It was like no human face I\'d ever seen. I began to think I was asleep, and dreaming of a story in a book.

\'They were not more than twenty yards from where I stood. My heart beat that loud I was afraid they\'d hear it. My hair stood on end, if any one\'s ever did, while as the tall, dark man began to poke the fire again, and pushed something further into it that was not a log of wood, I deuced near fainted, and beads of perspiration rolled down my forehead and face. What did I see that caused every drop of blood in my veins to turn to ice? What the strange man stirred in the fire, making the sparks to fly all round among the red glowing embers, was a corpse! There was no mistaking the dreadful shape. One arm stuck out. The legs were there, the skull blackened and featureless, and, Heavenly Father! beyond and in the middle of the heap of glowing embers lay another shape huddled together, and showing no angle of limb or bone. The other man, with a broom of boughs tied together, was busy sweeping in all the pieces of charcoal, so as to prevent the flame from spreading through the tall, dry grass. At a short distance I could make out a tilted cart, such as hawkers use in the bush. "By——!" said the man with the pole, "I\'ll swear I heard a stick crack. Any traveller as come to the water-hole and followed the track up, \'ll have to be rubbed out, and no two ways about it. It will be our lives against his!"

\'"Haven\'t we had blood enough for one day?" says the other man. &qu............