There were innumerable nooks and crannies where articles could be stored, but in every instance they contained nothing. Nowhere could he find anything more than the clothes.
He went to the mouth and stood peering round to see if there was another similar cave near, but everywhere else the ground rose solid and unbroken.
In the open space under the shelter of the bluff where the ground had been so much trampled by horses, the wheel-marks of a vehicle also showed. He walked over and examined them carefully.
They were the marks of what was evidently an old and rackety conveyance. One of the wheels was loose and askew on the axle, with the result that it made a wobbly mark on the ground, while the tyres on all the wheels were uneven in width and badly worn.
"Almost as ancient as old Dudgeon's rattle-trap," Durham said to himself as he looked at the marks.
The story, fanciful as he had regarded it at the time, of the buggy driven by two men with a pair of white horses, the story told by the travelling bushmen the day the bank robbery was discovered, recurred to him. If this was the vehicle in which the gold had been carried off, and the wheel-marks he was looking at had been made by it, then that gold was probably secreted somewhere in his immediate vicinity.
The thick-growing shrubs and stunted gums made it difficult for him to see far from where he stood. The level stretch along the margin of the pool showed clear enough, but around him the vegetation was so dense that, unless he had some clue to guide him, to prosecute a search within it was like trying the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.
During the time that had elapsed since those wheel-marks had been made they had been greatly obliterated, but it was still possible to distinguish where the vehicle had been stopped, for the horses had turned suddenly, and the wheels cut deep as they came round. He stepped to the spot. Later tramplings had removed all clear traces of footmarks. Nothing was now to be learned from that source.
His eyes swept along the line of shrubs which fringed the open space. A twig, snapped near the stem, dangled, its leaves brown and withered. It was a finger pointing where someone had forced a way through.
Durham went down on his knees beside the shrub. Near the root the bark had been stripped for a couple of inches, the scar showing brown, while in the soil the impression of a heavy boot was just distinguishable.