He was actually walking openly over the hills when he realised what he was doing, and with a shock decided that he was growing light-headed. He went back to his hiding and washed and dressed his wounds as well as he could, and made himself tea, and forced himself to bake a flour-and-water damper in the ashes, and to eat it.
He set himself to watch his own movements, and even his thoughts, and to set every nerve of his brain to keeping himself sane and under his own control.
But that night he decided to go back to the Ridge and leave a message for Gault. He couldn’t be quite sure whether or not this was rankly foolish, and a plan born of his pain and illness, and he tried to reason the thing out and to see it in every possible aspect. He tested his own brain and sanity by every means he could think of. He worked out little sums, scrawling the figures on the sand with a twig; he went over in detail incidents that had happened weeks before; he put dates to various periods in his life, and recalled the names of people and places he had met. One thing he would not allow himself—and that was to think of Ess. He felt that if he did his reason would not stand against the temptation to go straight back and risk everything for the sake of seeing her.
And he decided again to go down quietly, and at night, and try to get a message to Aleck Gault. He realised the risk. There might be a policeman there, the dogs might rouse everyone, the black fellows might pick up his tracks in the morning. It was all risk, but stopping there was more than risk; it was certain death, or, worse, a losing of his senses and a wandering on the hills or down to the Ridge, and being captured and taken in alive.
So that night, when Ess waked at the faint rustle of the blind drawn down on her open window, she thought it no more than the puff of a wandering breeze. And she lay awake for a time thinking of Steve, and wondering if he was lying out somewhere in the open under the starlight with the breeze fanning his cheek; or was he safe down in one of the cities; or perhaps somewhere out at sea making for another place round the coast, or over to New Zealand. And as she lay there, there was nothing to tell her that Steve at that instant was within whisper-reach, that he was standing listening for the faint sound of her breathing, that the rustle of her bedclothes as she moved set the blood racing in his veins and pounding in his ears.
And when she woke again in the morning and went to pull her blind up, she stared in amazement at the dirty smoke-blackened billy that stood on her window ledge just inside the blind. She picked it up wonderingly. She looked inside it, but it was empty. She took it out to her uncle at last, and told him where and how she had found it.
Scottie took it quickly and, without an instant’s hesitation, turned it over and handed it back to her, pointing out the scratches under the bottom.
“It’s an old bush trick for sending a message when a man hasna pencil or paper,” he said. “It’s like tae be a message for you.”
Plainly enough now Ess could read the printed letters scratched on the burnt and blackened surface with the point of a knife. She read, and then handed it to Scottie without speaking.
“Tell Aleck meet Fri. where we killed dingo pups,” she read. There was no signature, but neither Ess nor Scottie had need of a guess to tell who it was from.