The Moving Finger

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on; nor all your piety and wit Shall lore it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

Clearly outlined they stood against the summer sky; if there should be anybody in the creek-bed, lurking among the rushes and scrub round the waterhole, they would be plainly vi...

“Bail up, you -----,” said the shorter of the two, a man in a dirty red shirt and torn straw hat, who was evidently the leader of the party, “bail up; throw up your hands, or--,...

But before she had time to explain, one man--she recognized him as the Commissioner from the Indigo Valley on the other side of the ranges--had forced on her a glass of wine, an...

Then sleep, merciful sleep, came to them in their weariness, and they slept till the first faint streaks of dawn began to appear in the eastern sky. It was a dreary, hopeless wa...

He looked at the silent little figure in its pink gingham frock, leaning up against the rock with head bowed down on its clasped hands. Dimly he understood the struggle that was...

Still it lent them some comfort--that bright fire. They were a handful of men clinging there, drenched to the skin already, and every wave wetted them again with its salt spray,...

Had Gladys forgotten? He wondered. The little white mouse of a cousin, as Turner called her, who had cried so bitterly when he left, and even now answered his letters so regular...

Turner lay awake long after the light was out, staring up at the unceiled roof, at the faint light that marked the open doorway and the window, thinking, thinking, wondering at...

And the light broadened in the east, the rosy light grew deeper and deeper, then it paled to bright gold, and behind, and all around, the world looked dark against that glowing...

“Now, I ‘ll find you a man to ride. He thoroughly understands horses, I ‘ll say that for him, though I have no cause to love him. He ‘ll ride for you, but I don’t believe Boatma...

I got little enough sleep that night. Early in the evening my father and the most of his guests went down to the principal public-house in the township to look at the general en...

Dick turned over sleepily, rubbed his eyes, and went through exactly the same performance I had done, before he could rouse himself sufficiently to accompany me across the hills...