"Don't run away with my share of the reef while I am away," he said as he got on his horse early the next morning, and, followed by Billy driving the two horses, was soon lost to sight in the scrub.
"We may as well go out and amuse ourselves at the reef," said Morton; "we can do nothing until he comes back."
They saddled up, and spent the best part of the day in knocking stones out and breaking them, returning in the evening with a few extra rich specimens to add to those they already had.
"If we show these specimens when we get home, won't somebody suspect, and follow our tracks back?" said Charlie.
"If we are fools enough to show them," replied his cousin; "but we'll take all sorts of good care that we don't, until we are ready to come out ourselves, and have pretty well located the place. If Brown does not turn up before morning, we will go out again to-morrow and see if we can trace the reef any further."
Billy turned up with the two horses just at dusk. He had accompanied Brown some miles beyond where they turned back, but there had been no change in the creek as far as he went.
Brown, meanwhile, kept on down the creek after parting with the blackboy. It continued enlarging, and contracting again, in the eccentric manner of an inland water-course, but there was no sign of water, fresh or salt.
The silence, lifelessness, and the gloomy neighbourhood of the scrub on one side of him naturally affected his spirits, and when night fell the sense of loneliness was increased. As it was useless going on in the dark, he determined to give his horse a few hours' rest and then go back.
"The moon rises at twelve o'clock," he thought; "if I start then, I shall get back to the water-bags by daylight."
He short-hobbled his horse, sat down at the foot of a tree with his saddle at his back, and lit his pipe. The great stillness of the desert surrounded and oppressed him with the intensity of its silence. Not a leaf rustled, not a night bird could be heard; the jingle of his horse's hobble-chain, and his munching as he cropped the grass, was a welcome sound in that dreary waste. No one knows what a companion a horse is until he has passed a few solitary nights in the uninhabited bush of the interior. Gradually Brown felt sleep stealing over him.