"Hundred!" he called after the first half-minute, and "hundred!" in quarter of a minute more, while Ives raised a hand each time and played five-finger exercises with the other hand upon his thigh. At the same time Rigden vanished in a yellow cloud, whence his voice came quicker and thicker, crying hundred after hundred above the dull din of a scuffling and scuttling as of a myriad mice heard through a microphone. And the dusty fleeces disappeared on one side of the cloud to reappear on the other until all were through.

"And seventy-two!" concluded Rigden hoarsely. "How many, Ives?"

"Two thousand one hundred and seventy-two," replied the jackeroo promptly.

"Sure?"

"Certain, sir."

"And so am I," said Moya, riding forward, "for I kept tally too. Yes, the hundreds are all right; but nothing will convince me that they were hundreds; you might as well count the falling drops in a shower!"

Rigden smiled as he wiped the yellow deposit from his scarlet face.

"I may be one per cent. out," said he; "but if I'm more I deserve the sack."

So Moya allowed that it was the most marvellous performance her own eyes had ever seen; and these were full of an unconscious admiration for Rigden and his prowess; but Rigden was conscious of it, and his chin lifted, and his jaw set, and his burnt face glowed again.

Two of the musterers were told off to take the sheep to their new tank, for their own dust had set them bleating for a drink; the rest lit their pipes and turned their horses' heads for home; but Ives was instructed to stop at the rabbiter's camp and tell him whom to expect.

"It would be unfair to spring you on the poor chap," said Rigden to Moya.

Ives also had a last word to say to her, though he had to say it before the boss.

"That was something to see, wasn't it, Miss Bethune? Doesn't it make you keener than ever on the bush? Or isn't that possible?"

And he took off his wideawake as he shot ahead; but Rigden and Moya rode on together without speaking.

IX
PAX IN BELLO

In happier circumstances the rabbiter's camp would have had less charm for Moya. Its strings of rabbit-skins would have offended two senses, and she would have objected openly to its nondescript dogs. The tent among the trees would never have struck Moya as a covetable asylum, while the rabbiter himself, on his haunches over the fire, could not have failed to impress her as a horrid old man and nothing else. He was certainly very ragged, and dirty, and hot; and he never said "sir," or "miss," or "glad to see you." Yet he could cook a chop to the fraction of a turn; and Moya could eat it off his own tin platter, and drink tea by the pint out of a battered pannikin, with no milk in it, but more brown sugar than enough. The tea, indeed, she went so far as to commend in perfectly sincere superlatives.

"Oh, the tea's not so dusty," said the rabbiter grimly; "it didn't ought to be at the price you charge for it in your store, mister! But the tea don't matter so much; it's the water's the thing; and what's the matter with the water in these here tanks, that you should go shifting all your sheep, Mr. Rigden?"

This was obviously Rigden's business, and Moya, pricking an involuntary ear, thought that he might have said so in as many words. But Rigden knew his type, and precisely when and in what measure to ignore its good-humoured effrontery.

"It's the sort of thing to do in time, or not at all," said he. "You catch me wait till my sheep begin to bog!"

"Bog!" cried the rabbiter. "Who said they were beginning to bog? I tell you there's tons of good water in this here tank; you come and look!"

And he made as if to lead the way to the long yellow lip of excavation that showed through the clump. But Rigden shook his head and smiled, under two scrutinies; and this time he did not say that he knew his own business best; but his manner betrayed no annoyance.

Moya, however, contrived to obtain a glimpse of the water as they rode away. It looked cool and plentiful in the slanting sunlight – a rippling parallelogram flecked with gold. There was very little mud about the margin.

"So it is quite an event, this mustering?"

The question had been carefully considered over a mile or so of lengthening shadows, with the cool hand of evening on their brows already. It was intended to lead up to another question, which, however, Rigden's reply was so fortunate as to defer.

"Oh, it's nothing to some of our other functions," said he.

And Moya experienced such a twinge of jealousy that she was compelled to ask what those functions were; otherwise she would never know.

"First and foremost there's the shearing; if this interests you, I wonder what you'll think of that?" speculated Rigden, exactly as though they had no quarrel. "It's the thing to see," he continued, with deliberate enthusiasm: "it means mustering the whole run, that does, and travelling mob after mob to the shed; and then the drafting; that's another thing for you to see, though it's nothing to the scene in the shed. But it's no good telling you about that till you've seen the shed itself. We shore thirty-eight thousand last year. I was over the board myself. Two dozen shearers and a round dozen rouseabouts – "

"I'm afraid it's Greek to me," interrupted Moya dryly; but she wished it was not.

" – and no swearing allowed in the shed; half-a-crown fine each time; that very old ruffian who gave us tea just now said it was a lapsus lingua when I fined him! You never know what they've been, not even the roughest of them. But to come back to the shed: no smoking except at given times when they all knock off for quarter-of-an-hour, and the cook's boy comes down the board with pannikins of tea and shearers' buns. Oh, they take good care of themselves, these chaps, I can tell you; give their cook half-a-crown a week per head, and see he earns it. Then there's a couple of wool-pressers, a wool-sorter from Geelong, Ives branding the bales, Spicer seeing the drays loaded and keeping general tally, and the boss of the shed with his eye on everything and everybody. Oh, yes, a great sight for you – your first shearing!"

Moya shook her head without speaking, but Rigden was silenced at last. He had rattled on and on with the hope of reawakening her enthusiasm first, then her sympathy, then – but no! He could not keep it up unaided; he must have some encouragement, and she gave him none. He relapsed into silence, but presently proposed a canter. And this brought Moya to her point at last.

"Cantering won't help us," she cried; "do let's be frank! It's partly my fault for beating about the bush; it set you off talking against time, and you know it. But we aren't anywhere near the station yet, and there's one thing you are going to tell me before we get there. Why did you move those sheep?"

Rigden was taken aback.

"You heard me tell that rabbiter," he replied at length.

"But not the truth," said Moya bluntly. "You know you don't usually have these musters at a moment's notice; you know there was no occasion for one to-day. Do let us have the truth in this one instance – that – that I may think a little better of you, Pelham!"

It was the first time that she had called him by any name since the very beginning of their quarrel. And her voice had softened. And for one instant her hand stretched across and lay upon his arm.

"Very well!" he said brusquely. "It was to cover up some tracks."

"Thank you," said Moya; and her tone surprised him, it was so free from irony, so earnest, so convincing in its simple sincerity.

"Why do you thank me?" he asked suspiciously.

"I like to be trusted," she said. "And I like to be told the truth."

"If only you would trust me!" he cried from his heart. "From the first I have told you all I could, and only asked you to believe that I was acting for the best in all the rest. That I can say: according to my lights I am still acting for the best. I may have done wrong legally, but morally I have not. I have simply sheltered and shielded a fellow creature who has already suffered out of all proportion to his fault; but I admit that I have done the thing thoroughly. Yes, I'll be frank with you there. I gave him a start last night on my own horse, as indeed you know. I laid a false scent first; then I arranged this muster simply and solely to destroy the real scent. I don't know that it was necessary; but I do know that neither the police nor anybody else will ever get on his tracks in Big Bushy; there has been too much stock over the same ground since."

There was a grim sort of triumph in his tone, which Moya came near to sharing in her heart. She felt that she could and would share it, if only he would tell her all.

"Why keep him in Big Bushy?" she quietly inquired.

"Keep him there?" reiterated Rigden. "Who's doing so, Moya?"

"I don't know; but he was there this morning."

"This morning?"

"Yes, in the hut. I saw him."

"You saw him in the hut? The fool!" cried Rigden. "So he let you see him! Did you speak to him?"

"No, thank you," said Moya, with unaffected disgust. "I was riding up to see whether there was any water at the hut. I turned my horse straight round, and did without."

"And didn't Ives see him?"

"No, he was with the sheep; when I joined him and said I could see no tank, which was perfectly true, he wanted to go back for the water himself."

She stopped abruptly.

"Well?"

"I wouldn't let him," said Moya. "That's all."

She rode on without glancing on either hand. Dusk had fallen; there were no more shadows. The sun had set behind them; but Moya still felt the glow she could not see; and it was in like manner that she was aware also of Rigden's long gaze.

"The second time," he said softly at last.

"The second time what?"

This tone was sharp.

"That you've come to my rescue, Moya."

"That I've descended to your level, you mean!"

He caught her rein angrily.

"You've no right to say that without knowing!"

"Whose fault is it that I don't know?"

He loosed her rein and caught her hand instead, and held it against all resistance. Yet Moya did not resist. He hurt her, and she welcomed the pain.

"Moya, I would tell you this moment if I thought it would be for your good and mine. It wouldn't – so why should I? It is something that you would never, never forgive!"

"You mean the secret of the man's hold upon you?"

"Yes," he said, after a pause.

"You are wrong," said Moya, quickly. "It shows how little you know me! I could forgive anything – anything – that is past and over. Anything but your refusal to trust me … when as you say yourself … I have twice over…"

She was shaking in her saddle, in a fit of suppressed sobbing the more violent for its very silence. In the deep gloaming it might have been an ague that had seized her; but some tears fell upon his hand holding hers; and next moment that arm was round her waist. Luckily the horses were tired out. And so for a little her head lay on his shoulder as though there were no space between, the while he whispered in her ear with all the eloquence he possessed, and all the passion she desired.

In this she must trust him, else indeed let her never trust him with her life! But she would – she would? Surely one secret withheld was not to part them for all time! And she loved the place after all, he could see that she loved it, nor did she deny it when he paused; she would love the life, he saw that too, and again there was no denial. They had been so happy yesterday! They could be so happy all their lives! But for that it was not necessary that they should tell each other everything. It was not as if he was going to question her right to have and to keep secrets of her own. She was welcome to as many as ever she liked. He happened to know, for example (as a matter of fact, it was notorious), that he was not the first man whom she had fancied she cared about. But did he ask questions about the others? Well, then, she should remember that in his favour. And yet – and yet – she had stood nobly by him in spite of all her feelings! And yes, she had earned the right to know more – to know all – when he remembered that he was risking his liberty and her happiness, and that she had countenanced the risk in her own despite! Ah, if only he were sure of her and her forgiveness; if only he were sure!

"You talk as though you had committed some crime yourself," said Moya; "well, I don't care if you have, so long as you tell me all about it. There is nothing I wouldn't forgive – nothing upon earth – except such secrets from the girl you profess to love."

She had got rid of his arm some time before this, but their hands were still joined in the deepening twilight, until at this he dropped hers suddenly.

"Profess!" he echoed. "Profess, do I? You know better than that, at all events! Upon my soul I've a good mind to tell you after that, and chance the consequences!"

His anger charmed her, as the anger of the right man should charm the right woman. And this time it was she who sought his hand.

"Then tell me now," she whispered. "And you shall see how you have misjudged me."

It was hard on Moya that he was not listening, for she had used no such tone towards him these four-and-twenty hours. And listening he was, but to another sound which reached her also in the pause. It was the thud and jingle of approaching horsemen. Another minute and the white trappings of the mounted police showed through the dusk.

"That you, Mr. Rigden?" said a queer voice for the sergeant. "Can you give us a word, please?"

Rigden had but time to glance at Moya.

"I'll ride on slowly," she said at once; and she rode on the better part of a mile, leaving the way entirely to her good bush steed. At last there was quite a thunder of overtaking hoofs, and Rigden reined up beside her, with the sergeant not far behind. Moya looked round, and the sergeant was without his men, at tactful range.

"Do they guess anything?" whispered Moya.

"Not they!"

"Sure the others haven't gone on to scour Big Bushy?"

"No, only to cross it on their way back. They've given it up, Moya! The sergeant's just coming back for dinner."

His tone had been more triumphant before his triumph was certain, but Moya did not notice this.

"I'm so glad," she whispered, half mischievously, and caught his hand under cloud of early night.

"Are you?" said Rigden, wistfully. "Then I suppose you'll say you're glad about something else. You won't be when the time comes! But now it's all over you shall have your way, Moya; come for a stroll after dinner, and I'll tell you – every – single – thing!"

X
THE TRUTH BY INCHES

He told her with his back against the gate leading into Butcher-boy. Moya heard him and stood still. Behind her rose the station pines, and through the pines peeped hut and house, in shadow below, but with each particular roof like a clean tablecloth in the glare of the risen moon. A high light or so showed in the verandah underneath; this was Bethune's shirt-front, that the sergeant's breeches, and those transitory red-hot pin-heads their cigars. Rigden had superb sight. He could see all this at something like a furlong's range. Yet all that he did see was Moya with the moon upon her, a feathery and white silhouette, edged with a greater whiteness, and crowned as with gold.

"Your father!"

"Yes, I am his son and heir."

Her tone was low with grief and horror, but his was unintentionally sardonic. It jarred upon the woman, and reacted against the man. Moya's first feeling had been undefiled by self; but in an instant her tears were poisoned at their fount.

"And you told me your father was dead!"

The new note was one of the eternal scale between man and woman. It was the note of unbridled reproach.

"Never in so many words, I think," said Rigden, unfortunately.

"In so many words!" echoed Moya, but the sneer was her last. "I hate such contemptible distinctions!" she cried out honestly. "Better have cheated me wholesale, as you did the police; there was something thorough about that."

"And I hope that you can now see some excuse for it," rejoined Rigden with more point.

"For that, yes!" cried Moya at once. "Oh, dear, yes, no one can blame you for screening your poor father. I forgive you for cheating the police – it would have been unnatural not to – but I never, never shall forgive you for what was unnatural – cheating me."

Rigden took a sharper tone.

"You are too fond of that word," said he, "and I object to it as between me and you."

"You have earned it, though!"

"I deny it. I simply held my tongue about a tragedy in my own family which you could gain nothing by knowing. There was no cheating in that."

"I disagree with you!" said Moya very hotly, but he went on as though she had not spoken.

"You speak as though I had hushed up something in my own life. Can't you see the difference? He was convicted under another name; it was a thing nobody knew but ourselves; nobody need ever have known. Or so I thought," he ended in a wretched voice.

But Moya was outwardly unmoved.

"All the more reason why you should have told me, and trusted me," she insisted.

"God knows I thought of it! But I knew the difference it would make. And I was right!"

It was his turn to be bitter, and Moya's to regain complete control.

"So you think it's that that makes the difference now?"

"Of course it is."

"Would you believe me if I assured you it was not?"

"No; you might think so; but I know."

"You know singularly little about women," said Moya after a pause.

And her tone shook him. But he said that he could only judge by the way she had taken it now.

There was another pause, in which the proud girl wrestled with her pride. But at last she told him he was very dull. And she drew a little nearer, with the ghost of other looks behind her tears.

But the high moon just missed her face.

And Rigden was very dull indeed.

"You had better tell me everything, and give me a chance," she said dryly.

"What's the use, when the mere fact is enough?"

"I never said it was."

"Oh, Moya, but you know it must be. Think of your people!"

"Why should I?"

"They will have to know."

"I don't see it."

"Ah, but they will," said Rigden, with dire conviction. And though the change in Moya was now apparent even to him, it wrought no answering change in Rigden; on the contrary, he fell into a brown study, with dull eyes fixed no longer upon Moya, but on the high lights in the verandah far away.

"There's so little to tell," he said at length. "It was a runaway match, and a desperately bad bargain for my dear mother, yet by no means the unhappy marriage you would suppose. I have that from her own dear lips, and I don't think it so extraordinary as I did once. A bad man may still be the one man for a good woman, and make her happier than the best of good fellows; it was so in their case. My father was and is a bad man; there's no mincing the matter. I've stood by him for what he is to me, not for what he is in himself, for he has gone from bad to worse, like most prisoners. He was in trouble when he married my mother; the police were on his tracks even then: they came out here under a false name."

"And your name?" asked Moya, pertinently yet not unkindly; indeed she was standing close beside him now.

"That is not false," said Rigden. "My mother used it from the time of her trouble. She would not bring me up under an alias; but she took care not to let his people or hers get wind of her existence; never wrote them a line in her poorest days, though her people would have taken her back – without him. That wouldn't do for my mother. Yet nothing else was possible. He was sent to the hulks for life."

Moya's face, turned to the light at last, was shining like the moon itself; and the tears in her eyes were tears of enthusiasm, almost of pride.

"It was fine of her!" she said, and caught his hand.

"She was fine," he answered simply. Yet Moya's hand had no effect. He looked at it wistfully, but let it go without an answering clasp. And the girl's pride bled again.

She hardly heard his story after that. Yet it was a story to hear. The villain had not been a villain of the meaner dye, but one of parts, courage among them.

"There have been no bushrangers in your time," said Rigden; "but you may have heard of them?"

"I remember all about the Kellys," said honest Moya. "I'm not so young as all that."

"Did you ever hear of Captain Bovill?"

"I know the name, nothing more."

"I am glad of that," said Rigden, grimly. "It is the name by which my unhappy father is going down to Australian history as one of its most notorious criminals. The gold-fields were the beginning of the end of him, as of many a better man; he could not get enough out of his claim, so he took it from an escort under arms. There was a whole band of them, and they were all taken at last; but it was not the last of Captain Bovill. You have seen the old hulk Success? He was one of the prisoners who seized the launch and killed a warder and a sailor between them; he was one of those sentenced to death and afterwards reprieved. That was in '56; the next year they murdered the Inspector-General; and he was tried for that with fifteen others, but he got off with his neck. He only spoilt his last chance of legal freedom in this life; so he tried to escape again and again; and at last he has succeeded!"

The son's tone was little in keeping with his acts, but the incongruity was very human. There was Moya beside him in the moonlight, but for the last time, whatever she might say or think! And her mind was working visibly.

"Why didn't the police say who it was they were after?" she cried of a sudden; and the blame was back in her voice, for she had found new shoulders for it.

Rigden smiled sadly.

"Don't you see?" he said. "Don't you remember what Harkness said at the start about my fellows harbouring him? But he told me that evening – to think that it was only last night! – as a great secret and a tremendous piece of news. The fact is that my unhappy father was more than notorious in his day; he was popular; and popular sympathy has been the bugbear of the police ever since the Kellys. Not that he has much sympathy for me!" cried Rigden all at once. "Not that I'm acting altogether from a sense of filial duty, however mistaken; no, you shan't run away with any false ideas. It was one for him and two for myself! He had the whip-hand of me, and let me know it; if I gave him away, he'd have given me!"

"If only you had let him! If only you had trusted me," sighed Moya once more. "But you do now, don't you – dear?"

And she touched his coat, for she could not risk the repulse of his hand, though her words went so far – so very far for Moya.

"It's too late now," he said.

But it was incredible! Even now he seemed not to see her hand – hers! Vanity invaded her once more, and her gates stood open to the least and meanest of the besetting host. She make advances to him, to the convict's son! What would her people say? What would Toorak say? What would she not say herself – to herself – of herself – after this nightmare night?

And all because (but certainly for the second time) he had taken no notice of her hand!

When found, however, Moya's voice was as cold as her heart was hot.

"Oh, very well! It is certainly too late if you wish it to be so, and in any case now. But may I ask why you are so keen to save me the trouble of saying so?"

Rigden looked past her towards the station, and there were no more high lights in the verandah; but elsewhere there were voices, and the champing of a bit.

"If you go back now," he said, "you will just be in time to hear."

"Thank you. I prefer to have it here, and from you."

Rigden shrugged his shoulders.

"Then I am no longer a free agent. I am here on parole. I am under arrest."

"Nonsense!"

"I am, though: harbouring the fugitive! They can't put salt on him, so they have on me."

Moya stood looking at him in a long silence, but only hardening as she looked: patience, pity and understanding had gone like so many masts, by the board, and the wreckage in her heart closed it finally against him in the very hour of his more complete disaster.

"And how long have you known this?" she inquired stonily, though the answer was obvious to her mind.

"Ever since we met them on our ride home. They showed me their warrant then. The trooper had done thirty miles for it this afternoon. They wanted to take me straight away. But I persuaded Harkness to come back to dinner and return with me later without fuss."

"Yet you couldn't say one word to me!"

"Not just then. Where was the point? But I arranged with Harkness to tell you now. And by all my gods I've told you everything there is to tell, Moya!"

"You should have told me this first. But you tell nothing till you are forced! I might have known you were keeping the worst up your sleeve! I shouldn't be surprised if the very worst were still to come!"

"It's coming now," said Rigden, bitterly; "it's coming from you, in the most miserable hour of all my existence; you must make it worse! How was I to know the other wouldn't be enough for you? How do I know now?"

"Thank you," said Moya, a knife in her heart, but another in her tongue.

The voices drew nearer through the pines; there was Harkness mounted, with a led horse, and Theodore Bethune on foot. Rigden turned abruptly to the girl.

"There are just two more things to be said. None of them know where he is, and none of them know my motive. You're in both secrets. You'd better keep them – unless you want Toorak to know who it was you were engaged to."

The rest followed without a word. It might have been a scene in a play without words, and indeed the moon chalked the faces of the players, and the Riverina crickets supplied the music with an orchestra some millions strong. The clink of a boot in a stirrup, a thud in the saddle, another clink upon the off side; and Rigden lifting his wideawake as he rode after Harkness through the gate; and Bethune holding the gate open, shutting it after them, and taking Moya's arm as she stood like Lot's wife in the moonlight.