“Let me see. What a strange-looking thing! Yellow cloth, too. Why, it must belong to a prisoner. Oh, Maurice, the man who was here last night!”
“Ay,” says Maurice, turning over the packet, “it might have been his, sure enough.”
“He seemed to fling something from him, I thought. Perhaps this is it!” said she, peering over his arm, in delicate curiosity. Frere, with something of a scowl on his brow, tore off the outer covering of the mysterious packet, and displayed a second envelope, of grey cloth—the “good-conduct” uniform. Beneath this was a piece, some three inches square, of stained and discoloured merino, that had once been blue.
“Hullo!” says Frere. “Why, what's this?”
“It is a piece of a dress,” says Sylvia.
It was Rufus Dawes's talisman—a portion of the frock she had worn at Macquarie Harbour, and which the unhappy convict had cherished as a sacred relic for five weary years.
Frere flung it into the water. The running stream whirled it away. “Why did you do that?” cried the girl, with a sudden pang of remorse for which she could not account. The shred of cloth, caught by a weed, lingered for an instant on the surface of the water. Almost at the same moment, the pair, raising their eyes, saw the schooner which bore Rufus Dawes back to bondage glide past the opening of the trees and disappear. When they looked again for the strange relic of the desperado of Port Arthur, it also had vanished.
CHAPTER XII. AT PORT ARTHUR.
The usual clanking and hammering was prevalent upon the stone jetty of Port Arthur when the schooner bearing the returned convict, Rufus Dawes, ran alongside. On the heights above the esplanade rose the grim front of the soldiers' barracks; beneath the soldiers' barracks was the long range of prison buildings with their workshops and tan-pits; to the left lay the Commandant's house, authoritative by reason of its embrasured terrace and guardian sentry; while the jetty, that faced the purple length of the “Island of the Dead,” swarmed with parti-coloured figures, clanking about their enforced business, under the muskets of their gaolers.