Wilderness Trek by Zane Grey

Leslie met Sterl next morning at breakfast as if awakening from a nightmare; she appeared stunned to bewilderment that he did not notice her. Sterl felt that she, the same as Beryl, must learn her bitter lesson. Until that time she would not exist for him, so far as intimacy and friendly contact were concerned. He was deeply hurt, but not resentful. She was only a sentimental young girl, placed in a terrible situation. Sterl felt sorry for her. Little by little his love had grown until it had almost made him forget that he was an outlaw who, if he considered marriage, must find himself in a grave plight. Sterl had been hurt before by love. He could not kill this new love but he put it aside. Krehl's love affair with Beryl, however, had a fair chance to survive, if the girl herself proved strong enough to survive. Sterl seemed to feel something deep and latent in this Dann girl. She was blindly in love with this dark-browed bushranger. But when she learned the truth about Ormiston, as must inevitably happen, it was Sterl's opinion that the girl would hate him more than she had loved him.

January blazed to its end, but the rains did not come. They might skip a year. The heat and the flies had become insupportable. Yet human life lived on, though in each and every person there were signs, even in himself, revealing to Sterl's keen eyes that white people could not live there for long. The days were terrible; the sky a vast copper dome close to the earth; the night hot even till dawn. Work and meals were undertaken before sunrise and after sunset. The mob of cattle grazed slowly by night and rested by day. The flies were harder on them than the sun. Hundreds of calves were born. Stanley Dann had now more cattle than when he had left Downsville.