one side, and one forbiddingly blind one, as if death were there, on
the other. It might have been. The door opened, letting out a flood
of lamp-light and firelight which blindly showed the sides of the
coach and the near pole horse and threw the coach lamps and the rest
into the outer darkness of the opposing bush.

"Is that you, Harry?" called a voice and tone like Mrs Warren's of
the Profession.

"It's me."

A stoutly aggressive woman appeared. She was rather florid, and
looked, moved and spoke as if she had been something in the city in
other years, and had been dumped down in the bush to make money in
mysterious ways; had married, mated--or got herself to be supposed to
be married--for convenience, and continued to make money by mysterious
means. Anyway, she was "Mother Mac" to the bush, but, in the bank
in the "town," and in the stores where she dealt, she was _Mrs_
Mac, and there was always a promptly propped chair for her. She was,
indeed, the missus of no other than old Mac, the teamster of hypnotic
fame, and late opposition to Harry Chatswood. Hence, perhaps, part of
Harry's hesitation to pull up, farther back, and his generosity to Old
Jack.

Mrs or Mother Mac sold refreshments, from a rough bush dinner at
eighteenpence a head to passengers, to a fly-blown bottle of
ginger-ale or lemonade, hot in hot weather from a sunny fly-specked
window. In between there was cold corned beef, bread and butter, and
tea, and (best of all if they only knew it) a good bush billy of
coffee on the coals before the fire on cold wet nights. And outside