In the Musgrave Ranges

by Conrad H. Sayce

It was a strange position for a white man to be in, and if Stobart had not had a stout heart he would have given way to despair, and either "gone bush" entirely, as some white men have done, and become a full member of the warragul tribe, or he would have committed suicide. But Boss Stobart did not give up hope. The unaccustomed food was beginning to tell upon his superb health and strength, and as he sat by the little flame which seemed to get fainter and fainter as daylight increased, he knew that he could not afford to put off his bid for freedom much longer.

All at once his listless gaze was arrested. He leaned forward eagerly and stared at one of the rocky peaks. From where he was sitting, its outline against the light eastern sky looked exactly like the nose of a man lying down. It was so perfectly clear that Stobart laughed. But he was not laughing at its striking resemblance to a man's nose; certain words of the old Irishman who had been murdered by the blacks came to him. Pat Dorrity had talked in his sleep a great deal the first night after the drover had saved him from perishing. The man was feverish, and the sentences had been jumbled up and meaningless at the time, but Stobart's memory now recalled certain words which he had scarcely noticed at the time.

"Man's nose. Man's nose," the old fellow had muttered. "Man's nose seen looking east. Waterhole on other side. Look out! Look out!" Then he had become very excited, and such words as blacks and spears and gold and skulls had been mixed up in hopeless confusion.

The peak which Stobart was now looking at was certainly exactly like a man's nose, and he was also looking east. One direction was as good as another to him that morning, and, as his curiosity was aroused, he forgot about his breakfast and began to climb the hill-side towards the rocky top. Before he was half-way up the sun shone over the rim of the mountains, and he was very hot and thirsty when he finally reached the mass of rock on the summit. He looked down on the other side for the expected water-hole, but the valley was covered with dense scrub, and he saw nothing to give him hope of a drink. However, the ranges were so well watered that he started at once to go down the hill, hoping to find a spring or rock-hole somewhere in the valley.

He was disappointed for some time. The trees thinned as he reached the bottom of the hill and gave place to a broad stretch of sand. This surface showed no sign of water whatever, which was strange, for there had been several storms in the hills since Stobart had been taken prisoner, and the steep rocky slopes of the valley would certainly run off most of the rain which fell upon them. The drover had come across instances of the same thing in the Macdonnel Ranges, away to the north, and he knew that the rain soaked in at the extreme edges of the valley and ran away in a stream many feet below the surface, and never disturbed the sand on top. There is usually a water-hole at the head of such a valley as this, and Stobart was on his way up to look for it, when he received such a shock that he dropped his weapons and stood staring at the sand, his mouth and eyes wide open with amazement. He did not believe his sight. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and looked away, but when his gaze came back again, there was the same sign in the sand.

The tracks of a shod horse!

It was impossible to tell how old the marks were. There were only three or four of them, and they ran up a little strip of clay which the wind had blown clear of sand. They had evidently been made when the clay was soft during rain, and the imprints had been baked hard by the sun and would remain clear for a very long time.

Stobart gazed with utter astonishment at those few prints of a shod horse. They meant one thing, one thing supremely, a white man—a gold prospector most likely, one of the dauntless pioneers who had crossed the desert and had not returned.

The tracks led up the valley. Stobart picked up his weapons and hurried on. Soon he came to a natural embankment of sand which stretched across from one rocky slope to another. He climbed it. The other side was clear of timber. A glint of water caught his eye. The sun had just penetrated the cool shade of that silent place and was striking keen light from a water-hole at the foot of a boulder-strewn knoll right in the middle of the valley.

The white man's thirst was now so great that he was about to start running down to the water which lay so invitingly some twenty yards away, when something white caught his eye.