“I can’t, ’avic, I’m going to a christening at McFadden’s in the Glen. Away ye go. Good-bye.” Saying which, McKombo vanished from his sight. [[122]]
Widow Allan was very much astonished when Charlie returned and told his story, but her surprise was still greater when she saw the box of hard cash. She counted the money, which amounted to over three thousand pounds sterling; after which she fastened the box again, and wrote a letter to the manager of a certain bank in Sydney, and to which most of the notes belonged.
In due course the bank sent a representative to Allan’s farm, who informed the widow that the bank had been robbed of over three thousand pounds one night in June twenty years ago, and which had never been recovered. The bank agent departed with the money, but he left the poor but honest widow a cheque for £500—a sum which not only paid off the liability upon her farm, but enabled her to put something by for a rainy day and for Charlie when he came of age. [[123]]
WHISKERKISS.
CHAPTER I.
THE MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY.
In the heart of the far Australian wild—away from traces of civilisation, and beyond the hope of help, a brave youth, faint with travel and with hunger, reclines completely exhausted by the bank of a broad river. He is the last of a band of nine who have attempted to explore the central portion of our vast continent, where on the Atlas we read, written right across the great blank, Unexplored. All his companions have perished of want and thirst, and Roland Trent, although he has reached water, and has quenched his burning thirst, feels that he also must follow his comrades ere long. He is very weak and so fatigued that he cannot stand; but he can see the flowing stream and the sunlit landscape, which anon becomes o’erclouded in his vicinity by the shadow of some moving object between him and the river. What could it be? [[124]]
The explorer looked up in wonder, and beheld a small and very ugly old man standing and grinning at him. The creature was most outrageously grotesque in form—having, by some freak of nature, the body of a child with the head of a giant. No one, not even Mr. Punch, could boast a finer hump than protruded from between the shoulders of the intruder. From out a circular hole in his jerkin the hump rose bare, behind the big round skull, like a sugar loaf. He had small eyes, but they were infinitely more terrible than all his other deformity put together; at one moment they glowed with a phosphorescent sheen, which changed again to a vivid purple light, and from that to diamond flashes, without the closing of an eyelid.