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reflected that it seemed to be a fairly good season hereabouts, if it were so further on he would find it much harder to “die.” With plenty of water about the excuse would be too thin. These deserts had a disconcerting way of turning into a fair imitation of the Happy Hunting Grounds, when rain chanced to come. The land that lay between him and Tanami might be no exception to the rule.

He need not have worried. Two hundred miles further out the blight of drought had not lifted from the country, and a more hopeless red waste no semi-suicide need have desired. He stared at it from under the tin roof of the one public-house at Widgery with a sombre pleasure. (Widgery need not be scorned for having only one “pub”; it consisted of two houses, the pub in question and a blacksmith’s shop.)

“I ought to be able to do it,” he was saying.

“Rather you th’n me.”

“Oh, as long as the water-holes———”

“Ye—es, but can you strike them? Mind, it’s a long way. Done much o’ this kind of thing before? An’ you haven’t even got a bike.”

“Oh, I’m a pretty fair bushman,” bragged Tony, and noted how the publican immediately set him down as the new chum he was playing.

“They’re doing well at Tanami.”

“So I hear, but I’m not thinking of staying there. I’m going Home—but I mean to see the fellow I asked you about first, before I sail. . . .”

He flung the story out carelessly, his eyes on the quivering plain. He had repeated it so often now that the danger lay in his being too glib. The two men who listened were interested and slightly awed, but the latter emotion they would have perished sooner than show. It was swelteringly