Donald got off his horse, and poked about in the scrub for some time. Presently he said, “Ye’re richt.” He had been trying the ground with the handle of the pick, and it had run into seven loosely filled-up, hard-sided and hard-bottomed holes, arranged like this:
“Don’t ye see?” said Donald, pointing out the outside ones; “there’s where the posts stood, and this inside one is where the cross stood. The auld villain didn’t dig up the bones, though, if there are any bones, for the earth hasn’t been stirred anywhere else.”
The boys set to work with a will, and about five feet below the surface they came to a rusty-yellow crumbling skeleton. There was nothing in the look of the bones from which the boys, at any rate, could tell how their owner had met his death. But they dug up also what turned out to have been a white bone-handled pocket knife, when they had washed off the earth that encrusted it. The blades were almost eaten up by rust; the handle was the colour of bad teeth, and the rivets fell out, and it dropped asunder as the boys handled it; but on one of the sides was cut—“Andrew Wilson.”
The boys put back the bones, and filled in the earth again, and knocked up a rude fence once more round the grave. The sun went down as they were finishing their task, and before they got out of the gully the huge funguses at the foot of the shadowy trees were gleaming like lucifer-matches in the dark, and the curlews were wailing most dolefully. Both boys were very glad to ride out where there was nothing between them and the clear starry sky.
“I wouldn’t camp in there for a thousand pounds,” said Harry, looking back at the deep wooded gorge; and even Donald confessed that the place seemed “nae canny.”
IX.
THE OLD CONVICT TIMES.
The settler who remembered Old Cranky’s antecedents was Mr. Walter Daventry, son of a deceased Captain Daventry, who had moved up into the Kakadua district from the sea-coast, where he had first made himself a home. If I tell you something about Mr. Walter’s boyhood, you will get a notion of Australia in the old convict times. This Captain Daventry was a military settler. When Mrs. Daventry, and her son Walter, and her maid Phœbe, went out from England to join the captain on his grant, both mistress and maid thought they were never to know what comfort was again—that they were going, so to speak, to the world’s back-yard, in which all kinds of dirty rubbish were shot. Walter would have preferred India or Canada; people teased him so when they learnt that he was going to “Botany Bay”—asking him when he was sentenced to transportation—how many years he had got—and a good many more such silly questions, which they thought a great deal wittier than Walter did. Still, any change was acceptable that would take him away from the dull little Norfolk town that never seemed thoroughly awake, and its dark, long, low-pitched grammar-school, in which two masters, in cap and gown, nodded over their far-apart desks, and pretended to teach Walter and another small boy, and tried to fancy that they were preparing a lanky hobbydehoy for the University. Masters, hobbydehoy, and small boy all half-envied Walter, in a drowsy kind of way, when one morning he burst into that gloomy old school-room to say good bye. An hour afterwards he was rattling out of the dreamy little town along the Ipswich road, en route for London. The coachman was making his leaders and the off-wheeler canter, the guard was tootle-tooing on his horn; the townspeople stood at their doors and the inn gates, sleepily watching the coach that had come from great Norwich and was going to still greater London, and sleepily waving their hands to proud Walter, who had begged for an outside place, instead of being shut up in the stuffy inside with Mamma and Phoebe and an old gentleman, who wore a bandana under his fur travelling-cap, and got out for refreshment at every inn at which the coach stopped to change horses, munching ham sandwiches and drinking cold brandy and water almost without intermission when the coach was in motion. Walter had a much pleasanter companion in the coachman, behind whom he sat, and who told him stories about the gentlemen’s seats they passed, and gave him the biographies of all the horses, and even let him hold the reins sometimes, when Mr. Jehu got down at a roadside house to deliver a parcel or drink a glass of ale. Walter enjoyed the first part of the journey exceedingly, but he was very tired and sleepy before it was over.
As the coach swung through Mile End turnpike, the coachman woke him up with a back thrust of the butt-end of his whip, and said,
“Now, then, squire, you can reckon yourself in London.”