The eyes, still full of hatred though they were growing lustreless and dull, were fixed on Tony's face with a blinkless stare. The distorted lips moved twice without any sound coming from them. Then the chin fell; the glazing eyes turned up from their stare on Tony's face, up to the dark starlit vault overhead; a wavering sigh came as it were on the silent air of the night—and the unknown was dead.
For a time Tony stood looking down at him as he lay, the face, never beautiful, growing more hideous every second with the muscles setting rigid in the last expression of savage hate. The fire softly hissed and crackled as the burning logs flaked into ashes, and beyond the range of the ruddy light the bush formed a deep, impenetrable gloom, darker and more sombre than the deep blue of the moonless sky. The faint wind of night, scarcely perceptible to the senses save by the soft whispering rustle of the foliage, brought no other sound with it. All was still and silent, and Tony, as he stood, felt as a man will sometimes feel when he stands on a silent night in the great immensity of the Australian bush—as though he were something which had no material existence save the consciousness of the moment, and even that were an intrusion on the sublime calm of untrammelled, sleeping nature.
Then, as with the fury of a thunder-peal, there crashed in upon his half-numbed mind the significance of all that he had just seen and heard. The hate the man had shown him; the story of that ghastly revenge; the message he had scoffingly told him to take to his mother,—all returned to him in a moment, blended, as it were, with the hints Nuggan had thrown out, and the suspicion that had often been in his own mind.
The man had spoken of Ailleen; he had claimed the robbery from Leary's hut; he had boasted how he had stolen the child from its mother and left it at Taylor's Flat—and Nuggan had told him to ask next time he was at the Flat who Mrs. Garry was and what she could tell. Nuggan, too, had taunted him with the change in Ailleen's manner and the reason for it—the reason this man had named—the mystery surrounding his birth.
His eyes turned again upon the silent form on the stretcher, with the horribly distorted features and the face moulded in an expression of merciless hate and cruelty.
Mechanically he approached and pulled the end of the blanket over the staring face. With a shudder he turned away, and walked back to his seat by the fire. He was sitting there when, an hour later, Peters and Morton rode up with a led horse, walking lame, between them.
"Our man was thrown and dodged us in the bush," Peters said as he came up. "But we collared the horse and the gold. Murray and his mate are after the other. Hullo!" he broke off, as he glanced over at the figure under the blanket. "Has he gone?"
Tony nodded.
"Well, I hope the others have too—the mean sneak thieves!" Peters exclaimed.
"We'd have lynched them if we'd caught them," Morton added.