Brown stood patiently waiting for some minutes, and then the truth struck him. It was not the moon rising; it was a bush fire, a long distance away.
"Deuced queer," he thought, as he took out his compass, struck a match, and took the bearing of the glow. "It's too far for me to do anything, even if I felt so inclined, which I don't. Hullo! what's this?"
A bright light suddenly gleamed through the trees a little to the south of the other. This, however, was the moon in reality, and Brown turned his willing horse's head towards home, marvelling much at what he had seen.
"Fires travel any distance in this unoccupied country," he thought, "and that one may have come a hundred miles or more."
He reached the water-bags at sunrise, and gave his horse their contents, then, having strapped them on to his saddle, rode on and arrived at the camp at the spring about noon.
Morton could only account for the fire in the same way that Brown did; that it must have travelled a long distance, and that its presence did not denote the existence of water. On his part Morton was able to inform him that they had found another outcrop of the reef that morning, nearly a quarter of a mile to the south, and it appeared as rich as the one they had discovered first.
The waste ahead, however, still sternly confronted them.
"I wonder whether there is another creek further south that this one runs into," said Morton; "or there may be one it joins to the north."
"Very likely; this creek that has been humbugging us does not look to me like a main one, It nearly lost itself several times yesterday, and when I camped it looked very sick."
"We can easily settle the question in a day; to-morrow one go north and one south, as before."