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Updated: June 29, 2025
A passing traveller on horseback, or in a dray, raised clouds of it, which drifted over everything and covered everything with a light film, but yet did not drive the inhabitants into the Carrier's Rest, for the Birralong people were sober, as they usually are in bush townships sober, that is, as things are understood in the Southern Land of sunshine and freedom.
It occurred to her then that if she were also to ride into Birralong she would be able to hear what was said about Tony and Nellie, for now that the first flush of anger had passed away, Ailleen was beginning to feel something akin to jealousy. She had her horse saddled and bridled, and was away, with the intention of riding direct to the Murrays and learning the real state of affairs.
He ran a "tally" at the store for the few necessaries of his life, and every six months cleared it with money which came in a letter for him from a city in a southern colony. It was the one link which existed between Slaughter and the outside world, that half-yearly letter, and its contents the one unsolved riddle in the annals of Birralong.
When the table was disengaged and there were onlookers in the room, he performed what they termed "flash" strokes, and challenged promiscuously any one and every one to play for large and larger stakes, until the souls of the miners were wroth within them, and the men of Birralong yearned in silence for the return of Tony, who alone of all the township had succeeded in mastering the intricacies of the table to anything like the degree Gleeson had.
They happened to come out about sunset upon the Birralong road near Marmot's store at a moment when some of the residents were mutually encouraging one another to lose their tempers over Gleeson's swagger in the billiard-room. The appearance of Tony was hailed as a god-send.
Boughs stripped from saplings; sacks tied to long, thin sticks; even the coats off their backs, were the weapons used in the fight; for unless the enemy were defeated at the outset, a smoking waste of charred desolation would be all that there was of Birralong and the district when again the sun came up.
A verandah, ten feet wide, and with a roof resting on square, hard-wood posts, ornamented the front of the building, and formed, to the majority of the Birralong folk, its chief attraction for it was here that men gathered to smoke a friendly pipe with one another, and discuss such items of news as are likely to be met with in a bush township.
That was the story Birralong heard, and nightly was the gathering on Marmot's verandah entranced with the discussion of it, and the considering of all the pros and cons concerned in it.
The heat and smoke where Tony stopped nearly overpowered him, but Slaughter had dashed almost up to the oncoming line before he fired the grass; and the men of Birralong, who knew what bush fires mean, had no words to express what they thought of Slaughter's act. "Cold-blood Slaughter, eh?"
The township "hung-up" the following morning to watch the great match, for with the morning came the realization of the fact that Tony had already lost two out of three games with Gleeson, and that on the result of the fourth the prosperity of Birralong, and of the visitors within its gates, speaking figuratively, for at least a twelvemonth actually depended.
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