“They sha’n’t suffer from my neglect, Mr. Heathcote.”

“You have men about who mayn’t be so careful.  The wind, such as it is, is coming right across from your place.  If there were light enough, I could show you three or four patches where there has been fire within half a mile of this spot.  There was a log burning there for two or three days, not long ago, which was lighted by one of our men.”

“That was a fortnight since.  There was no heat then, and the men were boiling their kettle.  I spoke about it.”

“A log like that, Mr. Medlicot, will burn for weeks sometimes.  I’ll tell you fairly what I’m afraid of.  There’s a man with you whom I turned out of the shed last shearing, and I think he might put a match down—­not by accident.”

“You mean Nokes.  As far as I know, he’s a decent man.  You wouldn’t have me not employ a man just because you had dismissed him?”

“Certainly not; that is, I shouldn’t think of dictating to you about such a thing.”

“Well, no, Mr. Heathcote, I suppose not.  Nokes has got to earn his bread, though you did dismiss him.  I don’t know that he’s not as honest a man as you or I.”

“If so, there’s three of us very bad; that’s all, Mr. Medlicot.  Good-night; and if you’ll trouble yourself to look after the ash of your tobacco it might be the saving of me and all I have.”  So saying, he turned round, and made his way back to the horses.

Medlicot had placed himself on the fence during the interview, and he still kept his seat.  Of course he was now thinking of the man who had just left him, whom he declared to himself to be an ignorant, prejudiced, ill-constituted cur.  “I believe in his heart he thinks that I’m going to set fire to his run,” he said, almost aloud.  “And because he grows wool he thinks himself above every body in the colony.  He occupies thousands of acres, and employs three or four men.  I till about two hundred, and maintain thirty families.  But he is such a pig that he can’t understand all that; and he thinks that I must be something low because I’ve bought with my own money a bit of land which never belonged to him, and which he couldn’t use.”  Such was the nature of Giles Medlicot’s soliloquy as he sat swinging his legs, and still smoking his pipe, on the fence which divided his sugar-cane from the other young man’s run.

And Harry Heathcote uttered his soliloquy also.  “I wouldn’t swear that he wouldn’t do it himself, after all;” meaning that he almost suspected that Medlicot himself would be an incendiary.  To him, in his way of thinking, a man who would take advantage of the law to buy a bit of another man’s land—­or become a free-selector, as the term goes—­was a public enemy, and might be presumed capable of any iniquity.  It was all very well for the girls—­meaning his wife and sister-in-law—­to tell him that Medlicot had the manners of a gentleman and had come of decent people.  Women were always