"You can trust me, Mac," said Phil grimly. "I'll fetch you a specimen or two to play with," and Mac, noting his unusual fierceness of expression, felt comforted.
Leaving our over-eager companions in charge of the camels, I took a hurried bearing of our position, and dashed off with Phil in the direction taken by the fleeing band. I could still hear the branches crackling before their wild rush, and I hoped that the sound might guide us in our quest. For several minutes we kept up a rapid pace, but we quickly realised that our running powers were not equal to those of the blacks. The blistering sand showered in our faces, and the brittle twigs of the mallee cut us severely. The sun had now reached his meridian, and shot his rays so fiercely upon us that we were soon compelled to reduce our speed. We dared not allow ourselves to perspire, and so lose the little moisture our bodies contained. Meanwhile the vague crackling of the brushwood in the far distance became fainter and fainter, intimating to us very plainly that our intended prisoners were far from our reach. We were weary and hopeless, yet we mechanically continued on. Our thoughts, as may be guessed, were the reverse of pleasant, and we did not care to give them expression. Few would have recognised in Phil, the fresh-faced, merry-spirited young man who had led the Five-Mile rush. His face was now deeply bronzed, and bore the stamp of the hardships encountered, and his firm-set mouth showed a vastly increased force of will.
"The beggars seem to have vanished completely," he said, when we had travelled at least half a mile in silence. "What a tidy row of skeletons we'll make," he added lightly. "'A rale dacent coleckshun,' as Mac would say."
"We'll hear Mac's remarks later," I answered, "and we're not by any means dead yet."
We had now reached a slight dip in the land surface, and in the depression a well-padded native track appeared. We followed it eagerly until it broke off into two trails, forming an acute angle.
"You take one, I'll take the other," I said. "If you find anything signal with your revolver, and I'll do the same, though it is more than likely they lead to the same place."
"All right!" he replied, and we separated.
Hurriedly I sped along, now this way, now that, as the trail twisted and twined in the manner peculiar to most bush tracks, and I seemed to have entered a maze. Then I came to a point where it divided and subdivided, and I hesitated, wondering which branch to follow. I went down on my knees and closely examined the sand at the junction, and after a careful scrutiny I was rewarded by distinguishing the imprint of an aboriginal's ungainly foot at the entrance to one of the offshoots, and I hastened along the course indicated, half stooping and sometimes kneeling, in my extreme anxiety to keep on the pad, which could only be traced with the utmost difficulty.
Gaily-plumaged birds now surrounded me, chattering noisily, and their presence imbued me with hope. There, indeed, must be water near, if I could only find it. My guiding path led me several hundred yards over a sand and gravel surface, through which a stray blade of wiry grass peeped here and there; but gradually the grasses grew closer, and their trampled appearance showed me that some one had only recently crossed that way. I was brought to a halt abruptly. The track had come to an end, and I stood at the edge of a small circular space, in the centre of which a tall lime-tree stretched high above the stunted shrubs adjoining.