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They were riding at the edge of the immense sandy plain, patched with brown jaggled grass and parched brambles and prickly lignum vitae nothing to break the barren monotony but clumps of stunted brigalow and gidia, a wind-mill marking the site of an empty well with the few hungry-looking cattle near it. Now they dipped into a scrub of dismal gidia.
The straggling gum forest, interspersed with patches of sandal-wood and mulga, that backed the head-station, stopped short at the gully, and beyond, stretched wolds of melancholy gidia scrub. Looking up from the end of the veranda, Lady Bridget could see an irregular line of grey-brown boulders, jagged and evidently of volcanic origin, marking the line of gully.
He did not know the country at the head of the gully, where he concluded that Wombo was hiding, and lost himself in the gidia scrub. Thus, he was in a very disagreeable temper, when he at last arrived at the Bachelors' Quarters.
Lady Bridget knew that in five minutes, once they could be upright again, the fugitives would have reached the gully, and after that the gidia scrub. Then security from the terrors of a white man's gaol would be almost assured to them. Lady Bridget waited waited, it seemed to her an eternity, in reality it was barely over the five minutes she had mentally given the two blacks for their escape.
When she heard a footstep in the forest behind her, she started and turned and stared into the dim aisles of the gidia, as though she expected to see his ghost. 'Mithsis mithsis me Wombo plenty my been look out for you. Plenty mine frightened to go along a head-station. Lady Bridget laughed hysterically.
McKeith cut short the argument sound logic it seemed to Lady Biddy by an imperious, silencing gesture, and a sudden unfurling of his stockwhip, which made a hissing sound as it writhed along the ground like a snake. The black boy sprang aside. McKeith pointed to the gidia scrub and issued a terse command in the native language. Wombo turned appealingly to Lady Bridget. 'Lathychap!
A few pictures and etchings hung on the other walls among them several wild seascapes reminding one a little of Richard Doyle's exquisite water colours in which green billows and foamy wave-crests took the shape of sea-fairies. Also some weird tree studies mostly gum and gidia, where gnarled limbs and bulbous protuberances turned into the faces of gnomes and the forms of strange monsters.
'I would rather do it myself, she said. 'I'm not afraid. If it had been possible, I would have cut those horrible thongs straight away and let the poor wretch get into the bush. He'll be safe at the head of the gully in the gidia scrub. 'I promise you that he shall be safe in the gidia scrub before sunrise to-morrow. Trust me. She shook her head.
She stared out over the brown plain and the herds of lean beasts all shadowy in the smoky mist over the horizon, then round, along the wilderness of gidia scrub, with its charred patches afar off, from which there still rose thin spirals of smoke. Destiny had spoken. Here was the order of release.
With a few strokes of her pen she might end her irksome captivity in this wall-less prison of desert plain this wilderness of gum and gidia. As she lay there in the hammock, a child's clumpy boots pattered along the garden path and Tommy Hensor came up the steps with a big cabbage leaf gathered in his hand.
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