“No need to ’coct a plan. Don, he got the mark on shoulder, all the same Weevil tell me ’bout.”
“Nonsense!” Claude ejaculates,—he is perhaps rather too much given to making this remark when surprised,—“I know the mark you mean; it’s a bruise he got the other day when his saddle turned round on Kittie, careless young devil.”
“Oh, all right, boss; I ’spose I get blind now,” Billy replies in an offended tone, for nothing insults an aboriginal more than to distrust his keenness of vision. But his clouded expression dissolves into a sunny grin of satisfaction, as he sees that the information he has imparted to Angland has apparently excited a far deeper interest in Angland’s mind than he had supposed it would.
What Claude’s first thoughts are upon learning that which seems likely to turn out a most fortunate discovery for himself and several other persons besides little Don may easily be guessed. He conjures up happy pictures in his mind, that for the most part are variations of one glorious central idea,—Wilson Giles, with weak tears of joy dribbling down his purple countenance, presenting his golden-haired fairy of a daughter to the man who has recovered for him his “little Georgie.”
And if these mental sketches of our young friend’s are rather selfish ones, and more redolent of love and Glory than of the mutual gratification upon meeting that the long-separated father and son will soon enjoy at his hands, it is but natural, after all, that in Claude’s present state of mind it should be so. But cold second thoughts and chilly doubts soon come to tone down these brilliant visions. Then a half-conceived suspicion as to whether Billy and Don—or perhaps Billy alone—might not have concocted the story of the blue marks upon the boy’s shoulder duly presents itself; to flee away, however, before the knowledge that the tattooing and subsequent healing of the wounds produced thereby would take longer than the whole time the two individuals concerned have known each other.
For various reasons, at any rate, Angland determines not to investigate the subject further that night, and, as he rolls himself up in his blankets prior to going off to sleep, he tries to call to mind all that he has heard about the lost child.
During the second watch, which he keeps in company with his little purchase Joe, Claude remembers that Glory had told him once about a severe accident that happened to her baby brother not many months before he disappeared. It had occurred when some visitor at Murdaro head-station—who was rocking himself in one of the chairs upon the verandah and had not noticed the approach of Mr. Giles’s tiny son and heir—had heard a sudden scream at his elbow, and discovered that the rocker of his chair had crushed some of the child’s tender little toes.
“Ah, when I examine Don to-morrow morning,” Claude thinks, “I will notice if his toes are intact. I am glad I remembered this, as it will possibly throw some light upon the mystery.”
As Angland looks up in thought at the purple dome above him, where “the stars burn bright in the midnight sky,” suddenly a great meteor appears, and blazes into brightness as it comes in contact with the world’s elastic shield of air, and then sinks with a graceful, downwards streak of brilliant incandescence into earthly obscurity.
“What makes that fellow star fall down?” Claude asks of the owner of the small, dark figure standing by his side, who is gazing up at the purple-set jewels of scintillating worlds above the watchers’ heads.