The Rider of Waroona

by G. Firth Scott

Reining in as they came up to the small object, they saw it was an ordinary bushman's slouch hat. In the roadway, close to it, two long furrows were scored, while at irregular intervals up the rise flecks of blood glistened.

Durham leaped from his saddle and picked up the hat. On the lining was stamped the name of the chief Waroona storekeeper, Allnut.

"He's a local man," Durham said quickly. "Keep those fools back."

While Brennan checked the charging crowd, now racing up the slope, Durham went forward alone. On the sandy roadway the marks made by the prancing horse were clearly visible to the top of the hill. The animal had evidently been badly frightened and had reared and plunged from one side of the road to the other, but nowhere was there such a mark as he knew must have been made had the rider fallen. Nor had the horse plunged as a riderless animal, but as one straining against a tight-held rein.

At the top of the hill the marks showed down the other slope until the horse had reached a point where it would no longer be visible from the spot he and Brennan had been when they fired. There the track gradually approached the edge of the road and vanished on to the rough ground.

Durham sprang out of the saddle and bent over the marks where they left the road. The horse had been pulled round and ridden directly into the bush. With the last faint rays of the moon dying away it was hopeless trying to follow the tracks through the sombre shadow; nothing more could be done until daylight to follow where the man had ridden.

He had remounted and was riding back when the remainder of the men came up with Brennan.

"The track runs into the bush; there's no hope of following it to-night," he cried.

No hope? A dozen voices answered him with a flat contradiction, and past him there was a rush of barebacked riders hot on the trail. They scattered in a wide-spreading line, riding straight ahead and watching only for a gleam of the white horse amid the shadows of the bush.

Durham stood up in his stirrups and shouted to them to come back, but he might as well have called to the wind. The fever of the chase was in their veins, the reckless dash of the hunter fired by the excitement of the greatest of all pursuits, a man-hunt. While this held them, they raced, aimlessly, uselessly, but persistently.