LOST IN THE BUS 7. 25

 

“Well, if you promise to be very good, and not get in the way, or go out of the shed,
until the sun goes down a bit. My word! but you'll be baked before you get there. Why
can’t. you bide in till evening, Liberty? I never did see such a ramping child.”

“Tell you what, Belle,” interposed Tommy, with an air of settling the whole matter,
“you give us a bit of that cake I saw you baking yesterday, and a bottle of cold tea, and
we'll take it with us and have it in the shed. Ain’t I a fellow to think of things just ?”

“Ves, yes!” cried Libby, clapping her hands at the prospect of anything out of the
usual way, especially when a big sister is too busy to tell stories or do anything

shirts ”
then,” said the elder girl reluctantly ; “ but mind
father said it was just likely he might

 
 
   
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 
  

except “bother over father’s old
“T suppose you must go,
and be in by supper-time, for
be off to-night and not
And with hasty
burnt, shady, straw

wait till the morning.”

kisses, snatching up their old sun-
hats, which were always hang-
ing up within reach, the pair stepped out
into the glar- ing sunshine, one taking
the piece of cake and the other
the bottle of

each slipped

tea, which they
intoa pocket as

they started off to the
shearing-shed. . “Isabel,
Tommy, and Elizabeth,
whowascalled “Liberty” on

account of her fearless spirit

and daring ways,were the
three surviv- ing children
of James Benson, the
overseer at Korang, an
“up-country ” station in
Queensland, with about as big
a sheep-run as any in the : district. He
had had a great misfortune Betore he came there about four years ago, when Belle was a
lanky girl of twelve, and Tommy and Liberty were eight and five years old. Everybody
felt sorry for the sad-looking man with the three children in their black clothes, for
their mother with her baby-girl, and a boy two years older than Tommy had all been
drowned in a flood that had taken place at a little township on the banks of a creek a few
miles from some new diggings, where James Benson had been what they call “ prospecting,”
which means looking for gold.

It was a sad story. The flood had risen so suddenly that the mother had eH time to
snatch her baby out of its cot wrapped in a blanket, and the father took his boy up in his

arms, and they stepped out ankle-deep in water on the threshold of their cottage which