too had waited; ripped, raw, and bleeding, in the dews of the maiden bush, for the cleft hoofs to beat them to barren clay. Now the jiggers flashed from them to new life that called; and to their nakedness and poverty of rotting stumps the lawyer-thorn and vagrant convolvulus gave pity and careless covering.
For a full hour, as the sun warmed and the black gullies waked, the jiggers swarmed upward; labouring along the steep grades, and dipping with swallow-flight to the sturdy bridges that spanned creek and gully and swamp. And then the heart-hunger that jagged Randal always gave before the joy of the axe-helve cold in his hand, and the crackle of underbrush as the men crashed through and away from the life and the noise at the tram-head.
With the instinct which Purdey called a power of the devil, Punch Reynolds could nose out the best timber through the bitterest country that ever broke a man’s heart. He stormed the totara spur, quick-glancing in the shadows for each bole that would run a decent three feet across. Randal and his squad crashed after, obeying the sharp wood-pecker tap of the blaze; and before the axe swung for the scarf the clearers were under his feet, with long knives for the vine and young sapling. Cox ruled the next gang.
