their legs over their saddles and rode down the steep slope by the Camp
Reserve. The hoofs of the horses pounded the plank bridge that spanned
the Yarrowee, and striking loose stones, and smacking and sucking in the
mud, made a rude clatter in the Sunday quiet.

Having followed for a few hundred yards the wide, rut-riddled
thoroughfare of Main Street, the riders branched off to cross rising
ground. They proceeded in single file and at a footpace, for the highway
had been honeycombed and rendered unsafe; it also ascended steadily.
Just before they entered the bush, which was alive with the rich, strong
whistling of magpies, Purdy halted to look back and wave his hat in
farewell. Mahony also half-turned in the saddle. There it lay--the
scattered, yet congested, unlovely wood and canvas settlement that was
Ballarat. At this distance, and from this height, it resembled nothing
so much as a collection of child's bricks, tossed out at random over the
ground, the low, square huts and cabins that composed it being all of a
shape and size. Some threads of smoke began to mount towards the immense
pale dome of the sky. The sun was catching here the panes of a window,
there the tin that encased a primitive chimney.

They rode on, leaving the warmth of the early sun-rays for the cold blue
shadows of the bush. Neither broke the silence. Mahony's day had not
come to an end with the finding of Purdy. Barely stretched on his
palliasse he had been routed out to attend to Long Jim, who had missed
his footing and pitched into a shaft. The poor old tipsy idiot hauled up
--luckily for him it was a dry, shallow hole--there was a broken
collar-bone to set. Mahony had installed him in his own bed, and had
spent the remainder of the night dozing in a chair.

So now he was heavy-eyed, uncommunicative. As they climbed the shoulder