In the Musgrave Ranges

by Conrad H. Sayce

Sax had to put his feet down very carefully or he would have fallen through sheer weakness, but he caught hold of Vaughan and clung to him. This forced the delirious lad to look at his companion, but there was no spark of intelligence in his eyes; he did not recognize who it was; he only felt something holding him back from what he had determined to do. With extraordinary strength, considering his condition, he shook himself free, and started to walk away. Sax fell, but as he did so he stretched out his hands. They touched the other's bare legs. Sax clutched the legs and hung on with all his power, and Vaughan tripped and came down with a crash.

The sun sank below the horizon and left two perishing white boys panting in the sand in the fading light.

Sax remembered nothing more for several hours. When he came to himself again he was alone. His fall had rendered him unconscious for a moment, and this state had been immediately followed by a deep sleep. The night was cool, and though his thirst was still raging, it did not seem so bad as it had done under the blazing sun; his sleep also had refreshed him. On Central Australian nights it is never too dark to see the objects around, for the light of the stars comes through the clear dry air of the desert more brilliantly than it does in any other part of the world. Consequently it needed only a hurried glance to tell Sax that Vaughan was not in the camp. His clothes were still lying where he had thrown them, and the boy soon found the tracks of bare feet leading away from the camp into the scrub.

Vaughan had gone away to die.

Sax listened. The absolute stillness of death was around him on all sides. Not a leaf moved on any of the scraggy mulgas standing near. Even the star in the deep, deep blue of the night sky seemed to stare down at him with unblinking eyes. What did they care for one white boy dying in delirium in the desert, and another white boy who had to keep tight hold of his mind to save it from slipping out of his control, and who would also die of thirst, if not to-day, then surely to-morrow? There is nothing so unpitying, so absolutely unconcerned, as the desert is to a perishing man.

Sax was a boy of unusual courage. He was the son of a pioneer, a member of that race of men who have opened up the centre of the Australian continent, and have laid the foundations of the future Australian nation. Though he had been reared in the comfort of cities, the cattle-plains, the scrub, and the desert were his true home, and he now showed the stuff he was made of by determining to follow after his friend. He did not stop to wonder what he would do when he found him; he only knew that he could not bear to leave him out there to die without making an effort to save him.

Suddenly he remembered the quart-pot and its precious contents. He had made up his mind to find Vaughan before he remembered the tea, and now this sudden glad thought seemed to confirm his decision, and filled him with hope. He would have something to give to the perishing lad when he found him. Sax could hardly walk. The whole middle part of his body felt as if it was dried up, and when he moved, such terrible pains shot through him that he could hardly keep from crying out; but he set his teeth and went over to the quart-pot and dug it out.

Only those who have actually been in the same circumstances as Sax was that night can have any idea of the temptation it was for him to drink some of that tea. The very sound of it swishing about inside the smoke-blackened pot nearly drove him mad with thirst. He dared not open the lid and look in, for, after all, he was so frantically thirsty that the sight of the liquid might make him forget everything but his own desire for it. Never again in his life was he to be called upon to exercise such supreme self-control as he was that night.

Clutching the precious quart-pot to his breast, he staggered off into the night, very slowly because of his weakness, and very slowly also because it was hard for him to read the tracks in the dim light.

Less than half an hour after Sax left the camp to search for his dying friend, a black form stole silently through the scrub and paused within sight of the bough-shelter. If anybody had been lying there awake, he would not have known how near a fellow human being was to him, for the native was absolutely motionless, even to the eyelids. The only part of hint which moved was the chest, which was so thickly covered with black hair that its slow rising and falling could not possibly have attracted attention at night. Even if any man who might have been in the shelter had turned and looked straight at the black-fellow, he would not have distinguished him from the trees, for, with that wonderful power of imitation known only to the scrub natives of Australia, the man was standing in such a way that he looked very much like an old dead mulga stump.