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<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2> For months after the fires every settler in the hills was felling and carting timber. New homes were built on the d�bris of the old. Scarcely a house in the district had escaped the hunger of the flames. A burnt-out family lived in a tent, in a lean-to of bagging and bark, or in what was left of the walls, roofs and doors of houses, jammed together to form some sort of shelter against the weather. Every pair of hands were busy trying to get the new homes up before the autumn rains; and money was scarce. Most of the settlers had lost cattle and horses as well as their homesteads, sheds and crops. The wind that had driven the smoke and flames billowing before it brought a downpour which quenched the fire the morning after it had swept the southern slopes of the hills. For days it rained steadily. Light vertical showers soaked into the blackened earth. There was every prospect of a good season to make up for the damage done by the fires. Rain on fired earth makes for fertility, good grain, fat stock and an abundant harvest. The settlers worked like beavers to be ready for it, the prospect of a good season heartening their labours and leavening their disappointment at having again to do all the building and fencing that had been done only a few years before. The only places in the district that remained a charred monument to the fires were the school and the school-master's cottage. The Schoolmaster and Deirdre were living at Steve's again. By a miracle the shanty had escaped the fires; it remained standing when scarcely another house in the countryside did. Steve and two teamsters who had been hung-up on the roads had spent the night watching that flying sparks did not catch its splintery grey shingles. A corrugated iron roof had saved it, they said, although there was a good clearing on either side of the shanty. For the first few days after the fires, while the rain lasted, Steve's had been stretched to the limit of its capacity to shelter homeless men, women and children. The men camped as best they might in the bar, in the kitchen, and on the verandahs. Mrs. Ross, Jess, Deirdre, and Mrs. Mackay, her baby, and three small boys, slept in one room. And when Steve heard that Mrs. Morrison and Kitty, who had wrapped themselves in wet blankets and crept into a corrugated iron tank while the fires were raging around them, had no shelter but the tank during the rain, the Schoolmaster went to bring them into the shanty, and Steve and the Ross boys rigged a wind and rain screen of boughs and bagging round the verandah to make another room for them. Deirdre took charge of the domestic arrangements, though everybody lent a hand. Notwithstanding the terrible experiences every member of the house party had passed through, there was much more laughing than sighing, much more finding of humour in every phase of awkward predicaments than dilating on dangers and difficulties. Losses were discussed as the women helped Deirdre to make big, savoury stews and put bumper loaves on the ashes of Steve's hearth, but it was always with concluding exclamations of gratitude that "things were no worse." At Dale, only a few miles on the other side of the ranges, three mothers were weeping for little ones caught in the flames and burnt to death on their way home from school. No lives had been lost on the southern slope of the hills. All day the men were out riding in the rain, trying to get a better idea of the damage done. They ran up fences, mustered stray cattle, and in the evening brought back pitiful accounts of beasts burned to death in the gullies and dry creek-beds. When they sat with the women round the fire in Steve's kitchen, their great, green-hide boots steaming before it, breathless stories of fights with the fires were told. Most of the men had been away taking cattle to water when the homesteads were attacked. The flames had leapt the crest of the range and circled the clearings with incredible speed. The women had to do the best they could to save the children, the animals left on the farms, and the buildings, and many a good fight had been waged before they sought safety themselves. It rained steadily for three days; then the sunshine gleamed and Steve's house-party broke up. The men, restless and eager to repair the damage that had been done, were off at dawn; the women and children followed a few hours later, in lumbering carts and carry-alls. Some of them were going to make a lean-to of boughs and bagging, or of oilskins before night, and some were going for stores to the Port, or to the new township that was springing up about the Wirree river. There was bound to be plenty of work for every pair of hands for months to come. While everybody was busy, felling, fencing, splitting, and running up new buildings, it was rumoured that the Schoolmaster and Deirdre were going to leave the hills. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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