“Good-bye, and thanks!” said Ned, shaking hands as he jumped into his carriage.  “You’ve done us a good turn.  We won’t forget the South up in Queensland.  You didn’t tell me your name,” he added, as the train moved.

The man answered something that was lost in the jarring.  Ned saw him wave his hand and walk away with the portmanteau.  The train sped on, past sheds and side-tracked carriages, past steaming engines and switch-houses and great banked stacks of coal, out over the bridge into the open country beyond, speeding ever Queenslandwards.

Ned, leaning over the window, watched the sheen of the electric lights on the wharves, watched the shimmering of the river, watched the glower that hung over the city as if over a great bush fire, watched the glorious cloudless star-strewn sky and the splendid moon that lit the opening country as it had lit the water front of Sydney last night, as it would light for him the backtracks of the mazy bush when he forced his horses on, from camp to camp, six score miles and more a day.  It was a traveller’s moon, he thought with joy; let him once get into the saddle with relays ahead and let the rain hold off for four or five days more, then they could arrest him if they liked; at least he would have got back to his mates.

Newcastle faded away.  He took his precious photo out again and held it in his hand after studying its outlines for the hundredth time; unobserved he pressed the red rose to his lips.

His heart filled with joy as he listened to the rumbling of the wheels, to the puffing of the engine, to the rubble-double-double of the train.  Every mile it covered was a mile northward; every hour was a good day’s journeying; every post it flew by was a post the less to pass of the hundred-thousand that lay between him and his goal.  He would get back somehow.  Where “the chaps” were he would be, whatever happened.  And when he got back he could tell them, at least, that the South would pour its willing levies to help them fight in Queensland the common enemy of all.  It never struck him that he was getting further and further from Nellie.  In his innermost soul he knew that he was travelling to her.

What good fellows they were down South here, he thought, with a gush of feeling.  Wherever he went there were friends, cheering him, watching over him, caring for him, their purses open to him, because he was a Queensland bushman and because his union was in sore trouble and because they would not see brother unionists fall into a trap and perish there unaided.  From the Barrier to Newcastle the brave miners, veterans of the Labour war, were standing by.  In Adelaide and Sydney alike the town unions were voting aid and sympathy.  The southern bushmen, threatened themselves, were sending to Queensland the hard cash that turns doubtful battles.  If Melbourne was cool yet, it was only because she did not understand; she would swing in before it was over, he knew it.  The