"I'll be back to you before many hours are over, Lumley. I'll make all the haste I can," he said, his tone softened by a sudden pity for the disabled man.
Lumley looked up at him with implacable eyes.
"Ill believe you when I see you, mate. But you've bested me all round, and I've got to trust you, you see."
He dragged out the flat bottle from his pocket, and held it up to Gray.
"Turn your back on the moon and walk straight on; and if I ever see you again you're a bigger fool than I take you for."
"I shall come back," Gray said briefly.
He pocketed the bottle, and turned sharply away in the direction Lumley had pointed out.
He was hardly conscious of fatigue as he pressed across the sandy waste. Even the torture of thirst had grown less since hope had come to him. He hurried on with strong, eager footsteps, expecting every moment to see the trees lift themselves against the sky. Once the terrible thought came to him that Lumley had been deceiving him all the time, and his story of the water was a lie; but as he remembered Lumley's looks and words, and recalled the intensity of excitement in his face when he had left him, he knew that there was indeed water close at hand. Then, again, when he seemed to have been walking for a long time, and the horizon still lay before him bare and unbroken, he began to suspect that Lumley had wilfully misled him, and the water lay in another direction.
But it was almost immediately after this that his foot struck against a shrub, and looking down he saw he had come upon a banksia, a sign, as he was bushman enough to know, that better country was close ahead. The green leaves of the pretty little shrub were a welcome sight, and it was shortly after passing this that he saw the tops of the cypresses begin to show themselves against the sky-line, as the mast of a ship lifts first above the sea-line.
Gray pushed on with renewed energy, and it was not long before he was close to the gloomy trees. A cloud of birds, the crows Lumley had spoken of, rose from the trees as Gray approached, and flew screaming over his head. He listened to their harsh voices with a shudder, and hastily struck away to the left, where a low ridge crossed the plain and hid what lay beyond.