"What sort of a looking man was he?"
"Oh, a rather large man, red-haired, much pitted with the small-pox."
All this made me uneasy. I had asked these questions, by the advice of Dick, and, from Mrs. Hawker's description tallying so well with his, I had little doubt that another of the escaped gang was living actually in her service, alone too, in the hut with Lee.
The day that we went to Mirngish, the circumstances I am about to relate took place in Lee's hut, a lonely spot, eight miles from the home station, towards the mountain, and situated in a dense dark stringy bark forest—a wild desolate spot, even as it was that afternoon, with the parrots chattering and whistling around it, and the bright winter's sun lighting up the green tree-tops.
Lee was away, and the hut-keeper was the only living soul about the place. He had just made some bread, and, having carried out his camp-oven to cool, was sitting on the bench in the sun, lazily, thinking what he would do next.
He was a long, rather powerfully-built man, and seemed at first sight, merely a sleepy half-witted fellow, but at a second glance you might perceive that there was a good deal of cunning, and some ferocity in his face. He sat for some time, and was beginning to think that he would like a smoke, so he got out his knife preparatory to cutting tobacco.
The hut stood at the top of a lone gully, stretching away in a vista, nearly bare of trees for a width of about ten yards or so, all the way down, which gave it the appearance of a grass-ride, walled on each side by tall dark forest; looking down this, our hutkeeper saw, about a quarter of a mile off, a horseman cross from one side to the other.
He only caught a momentary glimpse of him, but that was enough to show him that it was a stranger. He neither knew horse nor man, at least judging by his dress; and while he was still puzzling his brains as to what stranger would be coming to such an out-of-the-way place, he heard the "Chuck, kuk, kuk, kuk," of an opossum close behind the hut, and started to his feet.
It would of course have startled any bushman to hear an opossum cry in broad day, but he knew what this meant well. It was the arranged signal of his gang, and he ran to the place from whence the sound came.
George Hawker was there—well dressed, sitting on a noble chestnut horse. They greeted one another with a friendly curse.