Waking warm and refreshed, the sick man faced the battle of life once more, and the chief taking command, and the man quietly and hopefully obeying orders, the woman found her promise easy to keep; but the mate’s hardest task had come, the task of waiting with folded hands.  With the same quiet steadfastness he braced himself for this task and when, after weary hours, the chief pronounced “all well” and turned to him with an encouraging “I think he’ll pull through now, my man,” the sturdy shoulders that had borne so much drooped and quivered beneath the kindly words, and with dimming eyes he gave in at last to the Maluka’s persuasions, and lay down and slept, sure of the Dandy’s promise to wake him at dawn.

At midnight the Maluka left the Quarters, and going back just before the dawn to relieve the Dandy, found the sick man lying quietly-restful, with one arm thrown lightly across his brow.  He had spoken in his sleep a short while before the Dandy said as the Maluka bent over him with a cup of warm milk, but the cup was returned to the table untasted.  Many travellers had come into our lies and passed on with a bright nod of farewell; but at the first stirring of the dawn, without one word of farewell, this traveller had passed on and left us; left us, and the faithful mate of those seven strong young years and those last few days of weariness.  “Unexpected heart failure,” our chief said, as the Dandy went to fulfil his promise to the sleeping mate.  He promised to waken him at the dawn, and leaving that awakening in the Dandy’s hands, as we thought of that lonely Warloch camp our one great thankfulness was that when the awakening came the man was not to be alone there with his dead comrade.  The bush can be cruel at times, and yet, although she may leave us alone with our beloved dead, her very cruelty bungs with it a fierce, consoling pain; for out-bush our dead are all our own.

Beyond those seven faithful years the mate could tell us but little of his comrade’s life.  He was William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with a mother living somewhere there.  That was all he knew.  “He was always a reticent chap,” he reiterated.  “He never wanted any one but me about him,” and the unspoken request was understood.  He was his mate, and no one but himself must render the last services.

Dry-eyed and worn, the man moved about, doing all that should be done, the bushmen only helping where they dared; then shouldering a pick and shovel, he went to the tattle rise beyond the slip rails, and set doggedly to work at a little distance from two lonely graves already there.  Doggedly he worked on; but, as he worked, gradually his burden lost its overwhelming weight, for the greater part of it had somehow skipped on to the Dandy’s shoulders—­those brave, unflinching shoulders, that carried other men’s burdens so naturally and so willingly that their burdens always seemed the Dandy’s own.  The Dandy may have had that power of finding “something decent” in every one he met, but in the Dandy all men found the help they needed most.