"H'sh! Did you hear a coo-ee?"
I shook my head in some surprise. My host seemed a good fellow; but hitherto he had proved an extremely poor companion, and for five minutes, I suppose, neither of us had said a word. My eyes had fallen from the new well, with its pump and white palings shining like ivory under the full moon, to our two shadows skewered through and through by those of the iron hurdles against which we were leaning. These hurdles enclosed and protected a Moreton Bay fig, which had been planted where the lid of the old well used to lie, so I had just been told; and I had said I wondered why one well should have been filled in and another sunk so very near the same place, and getting no answer I had gone on wondering for those five minutes. So if there had been any sound beyond the croaking of the crickets (which you get to notice about as much as the tick of a clock), I felt certain that I must have heard it too. I, however, was a very new chum, whereas Warburton of Gunbar was a ten-year bushman, whose ear might well be quicker than mine to catch the noises of the wilderness; and when I raised my eyes inquisitively there was a light in his that made me uneasy.
"Hear it now?" he said quietly, and with a smile, as a seaman points out sails invisible to the land-lubber. "I do—plainly."
"I don't," I candidly replied. "But if it's some poor devil lost in the mallee, you'll be turning out to look for him, and I'll lend you a hand."
His homestead, you see, was in the heart of the mallee, and on the edge of a ten-mile block which was one tangle of mallee and porcupine scrub from fence to fence. I shuddered to think of anyone being bushed in that stuff, for away down in Warburton's eyes there was a horror that had gone like a bullet to my nerves. I was therefore the more surprised at the dry laugh with which he answered:
"You'd better stop where you are."
I could not understand the man. He was not only the manager of Gunbar, but overseer and store-keeper as well, an unmarried man and a solitary. One's first impression of him was that his lonely life and depressing surroundings had sadly affected his whole nature. He had looked askance at me when I rode up to the place, making me fancy I had at last found the station where an uninvited guest was also unwelcome. After that preliminary scrutiny, however, his manner had warmed somewhat. He asked me several questions concerning the old country from which we both came; and I remember liking him for putting on a black coat for supper, which struck me as a charming conceit in that benighted spot, and not a woman within twenty-five miles of us. His latest eccentricity pleased me less. Either he was chaffing me, and he had heard nothing (but his sombre manner made that incredible), or he was prepared to let a fellow-creature perish fearfully without an attempt at rescue. I was thankful when he explained himself.
"I know who it is, you see," he said presently, striking a match on the hurdle and re-lighting his pipe. "It's all right."
"But who is it?" said I; for that would not do for me.
"It's Mad Trevor," he returned gravely. "Come now!" he added, looking me in the face much as he had done before inviting me to dismount; "do you mean to say you have got as far as this and never heard the yarn of Mad Trevor of Gunbar?"