of course followed him, and the loud yell of fear and pain raised by the
victim brought half the homestead to the scene of the catastrophe. Jim
was the only one who did not wait for developments. He found business at
the lagoon.

The queerest part of it was that Lee Wing firmly believed Hogg to be the
author of his woe. Nothing moved him from this view, not even when Jim,
finding how matters stood, owned up like a man. "You allee same goo'
boy," said the pigtailed one, proffering him a succulent raw turnip. "Me
know. You tellee fine large crammee. Hogg, he tellee crammee, too. So
dly up!" And Jim, finding expostulation useless, "dried up" accordingly
and ate the turnip, which was better than the leek.

To the right of the homestead at Billabong a clump of box trees
sheltered the stables that were the unspoken pride of Mr. Linton's
heart.

Before his time the stables had been a conglomerate mass, bark-roofed,
slab-sided, falling to decay; added to as each successive owner had
thought fit, with a final mixture of old and new that was neither
convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses during
his first week of occupancy and, in the second, turning them out to
grass with less apology, had pulled down the rickety old sheds,
replacing them with a compact and handsome building of red brick, with
room for half a dozen buggies, men's quarters, harness and feed rooms,
many loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held--and
where, indeed, many a one was held, when all the young farmers and
stockmen and shearers from far and near brought each his lass and
tripped it from early night to early dawn, to the strains of old Andy
Ferguson's fiddle and young Dave Boone's concertina. Norah had been