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Less for the sake of that poor selector's wife than for his own dream of wife and child, he tied up his barge and turned his steamer's head towards the Hill township.

The woman's only intelligence lay in her mother love. She was one of those half-souled creatures that drift through life in the Australian bush, going through most of the acts of the great drama of existence in a tadpolish fashion, but who suddenly rise in the crisis of an episode to something of the stature of a civilized woman.

When her child was seized with convulsions, she had waded through the scrub, and waded through lagoons, ten miles from her husband's selection--he was away shearing--to the river-bank, with the dim hope of getting a doctor somehow. It was really Linton who had put it into her head to ask Barton to take her to Swan Hill. With the ignorant woman's inability to look at more than one thing at a time, she became convinced that in going to Swan Hill lay hope for her child; and in the tragic moment when she had made her last and successful appeal to Jim, she had struck the one chord of his nature to which his will would respond.

Half-way to the lower township the infant must have died. But the men did not know it, and the woman did not apparently realize it. She had fallen into a stupor of exhaustion, only rousing herself once when engineer Charlie, a father himself, had endeavoured to take the child from her and put it into a hot bath. Then she defied him to touch it. It was eleven o'clock when the puntman at the Hill was roused, and begged by Jim to take the woman to a doctor. She had to be lifted over the boat-side, and then it was that, as the mate forced the child from her, so that she herself might be carried to the shore, he discovered it was dead.

"Dead!" he exclaimed. "Dead and cold."

"Dead!" she shrieked, "dead! Oh, you devils! you've killed it. If you'd come when I asked you first it would not ha' died!" And that was Jim's thanks and reward.

At least all that fell within human ken. "All-judging Jove" may, however, have viewed the issues differently.

The Jessie Jane was still breathing her fatal exhaust, "Break you, break you--Jim!" when she reached Pugga Milly again. By that time twenty-four hours' steaming had done its work on the engineer and fireman. She was hauling in the tow-rope of the barge, and the latter craft was just beginning to cut the stream, when--

The Jessie Jane, and her skipper, and mate, and engineer, and one deck--hand, and the hopes of the Mungadel contract, and the mortgage went skywards (and literally on to Pugga Milly Island) at the instance of the Jessie Jane's boiler. The pressure-gauge had registered more and more as the eyes of engineer Charlie and his fireman had become heavier, and ten minutes after the eyelids had closed entirely, the index-hand of the gauge had reached what old Freeman called "explosion point." Charlie had been roused by the skipper hailing the barge when the Jessie reached Pugga Milly, but, still drowsy, had not noticed the gauge, till the sudden hiss of the enfranchised steam merged and thundered into a roar like the trumpet of doom. And that was the end of everything for the Jessie Jane and her crew.

When the Echuca Steam Navigation Board investigated the circumstances, sufficient came out, in the evidence of his own men, to take some of the gilding from the glory of Skipper Linton's achievement. And he received a round-robin from the boat-skippers one day that suggested that he should return to the ocean-going trade, and run down some more Greeks. They wanted "white" men on the rivers, so the note said. Tom M'Grundy did not get his pony--then.