To his delight, on reaching the hiding-place he found that the bag was gone, and for the moment he was convinced that Leather had fetched it; but Nic’s next thought was startling:
“Suppose Brookes had been suspicious—had seen it and taken it away.”
The thought was horrible, but he dismissed it, telling himself that he was too ready to imagine things; and, determined to try and find the convict again, he mounted and rode along parallel with the edge of the gorge till he was as nearly as he could guess to where the patch of rock had slipped down.
Here, in a shut-in tract of grassy land, he dismounted, cast his hobbled horse loose to graze, and shouldering his gun, went in among the trees and tried to find the stone trap in which he had been caught.
He looked around him, and then started off in the direction Leather had taken that evening, keeping about fifty yards from the edge so that this distance would serve for his guidance back, and kept looking to right and left for some signs of the convict having passed that way, but finding none.
Every step he took for quite an hour led him through fresh beauties. He had no desire to use his gun; so, as if in consequence, birds of brilliant plumage flitted from tree to tree, or rose in flocks to fly shrieking to the coverts. Twice over he saw snakes; lizards seemed to be wonderfully plentiful wherever the stones lay scorching in the sunshine. Every now and then he saw the Blue Mountains, rising up tier after tier, across the gorge, and as he peered through the various openings he could not help noticing how thoroughly they deserved their names.
But he only saw one natural object in his mental view, and that was the great deep crack, which he felt sure he would encounter before long, running at right angles across his path, and this he felt equally sure would be the way down into the gorge and to Leather’s home.
“And if he can go down it,” said Nic to himself, “I can, and what’s more, I will.”
But at the end of another hour there was no sign of any rift such as he had pictured, and beginning to grow hot and weary, he turned to find a sheltered spot where he could rest and refresh himself with some of the provisions that he had intended to share with the convict, when, to his astonishment, he found himself face to face with him, for Leather stood with his back against a stone.