[2] Millie, the wife of a labourer in a rural farming community, waits alone in her house, while her husband and the other men of the village go in search of Harrison, an Englishman who has supposedly shot and killed a neighbour, Mr Williamson.
After speculating on the eventual lynching of the suspect, then thinking about her own childlessness and looking at her wedding pictures in Mount Cook, Millie hears a noise coming from the garden and finds a wounded man lying there.
The wounded man asks when the other men are due to return, and Millie realizes that this is Harrison, the suspected murderer.
Millie runs out into the street in a state of heightened excitement, barefoot and in her nightdress, feeling "a strange mad joy" at the chase.
Millie's final words are ambiguous: in spite of her earlier protectiveness towards the hunted man, she urges Sid to shoot him, shrieking and dancing barefoot in the dust.