Tim made an affirmative sign, and the men left him to prepare their cart, having first made him as comfortable as circumstances would permit, by propping him up with some bundles of grass. They then proceeded to make a high and springy bed in their empty cart, forming it of alternate layers of grass and soft ti-tree bark; then bringing the little waggon up to where Tim was lying, they lifted him carefully and tenderly in.
Whilst one man walked by the side, and attended to any wants of the sufferer, the other guided the horse carefully over rough places, and in this way they reached Sydney after several hours’ travelling, and without any conversation on the road, excepting that when they rested once to give Tim a little relief from the jolting, they asked him who shot him.
Tim whispered back, “Don’t know; never saw him in my life.”
The two good Samaritans deposited our forester at the hospital, and upon inquiring of the doctor whether it was a very bad case, received for answer, “Don’t know yet; shot through the lung, and chilled all night in the dew.”
CHAPTER XIV.
Mat on the trail of the bushranger—Annie’s signal—Mat tracks the bushranger to his lair—The cave—Our hero as the black warrior once more—A fearful fight—Dromoora’s timely cry—Annie’s rescue—Blissful moments.
Before Mat made his start after the bushranger, he had buckled on a brace of pistols, loaded his gun with a heavy charge of slugs, and put some matches in his leather pouch. Trusting entirely to his powers of tracking, he went on foot, knowing that he could approach his quarry in this manner, and no other. Food he did not stop for, either to eat or to burden himself with, that he could procure whenever he wished it. One thing that puzzled him was, what had become of Dromoora; the chief had disappeared directly the white men had dismounted after their ride from the out-station. However, he had no time to search, his first object was to find the tracks of the horse which carried the greatest weight; he could tell as well as any of the station blacks whether a horse was being ridden, or simply driven without a rider.
Daylight had broken, and our forester very soon discovered that one horse had galloped away free, one had been ridden by an ordinary weight, whilst the third, which had gone straight away, had carried a double weight.
The tracks of this last animal he followed up for the first few miles at a steady run, only pulling up at mid-day for a short respite at a water-hole. Towards evening, as the tracks became fainter, he changed to a more moderate pace, so as not to overrun the trail; all night he stuck to it like a sleuth-hound, sometimes subsiding into a walk, then, as the tracks stood out in the soft ground in the clear starlight, quickening his pace again.
For the first few miles of his pursuit he had noticed the track of a naked foot which had followed the horse, and which he presumed belonged to some one of the station blacks who frequented that part, but after a bit these footmarks disappeared in a direction away from the one that the horse was taking.