I tried to scream—the water choked me. I let go and swam on, and then up. I shot out of the water waist high, gasping and glaring wildly, and then soused under again. As I again came up I dashed the water from my eyes. I saw the surface of the pool break, and a head rose slowly. Kind Heaven! there were two! Slowly the two bodies rose across the black margin where the shadow ceased, full in the moonlit portion of the pool—cold, clear and horrible in their ghastly nakedness. And as they rose the murderous wounds appeared. The dank hair hung over their foreheads; the glazed and sightless eyeballs were fixed with the vacant stare of death on me. One bore a terrible gash from temple to eye, and lower down the bluish red slit of an assegai on the left breast.
On the other was one wound only; but how awful! The throat was cut from ear to ear; the bluish lips of the great gash hung wide apart where my hand had torn them. I could even see the severed windpipe. The head was thrown slightly back, but the eyes glared down at me with an awful stony glare, while through the parted lips the teeth gleamed and grinned cold and bright as they caught the light of the moon. One glance—half an instant—showed me all this, and then, as the figures rose waist high, I saw one arm rigid at right angles to the body from the elbow, and the stiff hand that had clawed me. For one instant they poised, balancing; then, bowing slowly over, they came down on the top of me.
Then indeed my brain seemed to go. I struggled under them. I fought and shrieked; but I suppose the bubbles came up in silence. The dead stiff hand was laid on my head and pressed me down—down, down! Then the hand of death slipped, and I was free. Once I kicked them as I struggled to the surface, and gasping, frantic, mad, made for the bank. On, on, on! O God! would I never reach it? One more effort, a wrench, and I was out. Never a pause now. One bound, and I had passed the ledge; then up and up, past the cliffs, over the rocks, cut and bleeding, on I dashed as fast as mortal man ever raced. Up, up the stony path, till, with torn feet and shaking in every limb, I reached the waggon. There was an exclamation, a pause, and then a perfect yell of laughter. The laugh saved me; the heartless cruelty of it did what nothing else could have done—it roused my temper; but for that, I believe I should have gone mad.
Harding alone came forward anxiously towards me.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “For God’s sake, what is it?”
The laugh had sobered me, and I answered quietly that it was nothing much—just a thing I would like him to see down at the pool. There were a score of questions in anxious and half-apologetic tones, for they soon realised that some thing was wrong; but I answered nothing, and so they followed me in silence, and there, on the oily, unbroken surface of the silent pool, floated in grim relief the two bodies. We pulled them out and found the corpses lashed together. At the end of the rope was an empty loop, the stone out of which I must in my struggle have dislodged. Close to the nigger we laid them, with another pile of stones to mark the spot; but who they were and where they came from none of us ever knew for certain.
The week before this two lucky diggers had passed through Newcastle from the fields, going home. Four years have now passed, letters have come, friends have inquired, but there is no news of them, and I think, poor chaps! they must have “gone home” by another route.