By-and-bye the boys came to the head of a fern-tree gully, and plunged into its moist, warm, dim, luxuriant jungle, overshadowed by gigantic trees. Even what they call the “dwarf” tea tree ran up there to more than one hundred feet. They rode under blackwood trees, twenty feet round at the ground, and without a branch on the straight bole for eighty feet, beech trees two hundred feet high, and gum trees with tops twice as high as theirs. Huge creepers draped and interlaced those monsters. Some of the fern trees were more than fifty feet high, and above the feathery fans of the little ferns great stag-horns spread their antlers, and nest-ferns drooped their six-foot fronds. There were fragrant sassafras trees, too, in the gully, and the gigantic lily pierced the jungle with its long spear-shaft.
As the boys were forcing their way through it on their horses, with many a scratch and damp smack in the face from the swinging boughs, they came suddenly upon a little square of broken-down, almost smothered fencing. Inside there was more jungle, but a rough wooden cross showed them that they were looking at a bush grave. Initials and a date had been rudely carved upon the cross, but an A and 8 were all that could be made out of them. The boys had never heard of any one buried there, and it made them very serious at first to find a forgotten grave in that lonely place. They got off their horses, and took off their hats, and stood looking at the grave for some minutes in silence. Then they mounted again, and rode on, feeling, until they got out of the gully, as if they had been at a funeral. They had other things to think about when they rode into the sunshine again. They had the cattle to look up, and a camping-place to pick, because they were not going back to Wonga-Wonga until next day. But when they sat by their fire in the evening, with the weird night-wind moaning in the bush and sighing through the scrub around them, their thoughts went back to the bush grave.
“A ROUGH WOODEN CROSS SHOWED THEM A BUSH GRAVE.”
“We may die some day like that, Donald,” said Harry, “without a soul to know where we’re buried. It seems dreary somehow, don’t it?”
“Somebody maun hae kenned where that puir fellow was buried,” answered logical Donald, “because he couldna hae buried himsel’, and put that cross up, and cut his name on’t.”
“Ah, perhaps the other fellow murdered him,” cried Harry. “And yet he’d hardly have put the cross up, if he had. No, I expect there were two of them out going to take up new country, just as you and me may be out some day, and one of ’em died. It must have been dreary work for the other chap then, and perhaps he died all by himself, and nobody knows what became of him.”
When the boys got back to Wonga-Wonga with their cattle, they made inquiries about the grave in the fern-tree gully, but no one else on the station had either seen it or heard of it before. Old Cranky, the men said, was the only one likely to know anything about it. The old man happened to come to Wonga-Wonga three days afterwards, and Harry at once began to question him about the grave. At first Old Cranky seemed not to understand what he was being asked—then a half-sly, half-frightened look came into his face, and he said that he knew every foot of the Bush for many a mile anywhere thereabouts, and he was sure there wasn’t a grave in it. Then he said he had never been in that gully; and then he said, Oh yes, he had, and there was a grave in it years back—he remembered now—why, it was an old mate of his—they had been lagged together and had cut away together, because the cove was such a Tartar, and Squinny had knocked up, and it was he who had buried him there, and put up a cross to keep the devil off. He remembered it now as if it had all happened yesterday.
“And is it up yet?” the old man went on. “My word! a A and a 8? Oh, the A was for Andrew—that was Squinny’s name—Andrew Wilson. Didn’t you see ne’er a W? I mind the knife slipped, an’ I cut my finger makin’ it. 8? Let’s see—it was 18, summut 8, or was it 17? when I buried Squinny.”
And then Old Cranky burst out laughing, and said that he had been gammoning Harry all through—he knew nought about the grave, and didn’t believe there was one. Harry had been spinning him a yarn, and so he had spun Harry one to be quits.