'It was strange!' she said musingly. 'He was never the man to say he'd do a thing and then change his mind. No; good or bad, he'd stick to it, poor Lance! Well, I must be going. So 'long.'
Slowly the woman rode forward—rode along lost in thought, while the mare, keeping to the track instinctively, like most bush hackneys, shuffled along at her fast amble till they came to the Mountain Ash Flat, which lay between this reef and Omeo.
Here the mare made as if to follow an old cattle track, at right angles to the road, of which she possibly had previous knowledge.
'Won't do, old woman,' said Kate, aroused from her reverie by the slight change of direction; 'what road's this, I wonder? More tracks than one along it—one would think it led somewhere.' She stooped low from her horse, scanning with keen and practised vision the footmarks upon the pathway. 'God in heaven!' she suddenly exclaimed, 'how did that come there?'
In an instant she was off her horse and eagerly grasping at a glittering speck amid the grass. It was a chain—a gold watch-chain with a curious coin attached, which she knew well. She had often playfully noticed the female face upon it. Here it was. She held it to the light. A part was dimmed and mud-encrusted. It had been trodden into the earth, but since washed by the rain. And what was the stain, dark red across the gold? 'His chain—Lance Trevanion's chain!' she murmured to herself. 'How did it come here? Of course he may have dropped it. I'll run these tracks a bit. It looks as if—as if—but no! surely, it can't—can't have been. Oh, my God! they never could have murdered him!' As she muttered to herself, in disjointed and broken sentences, she led her horse along the narrow track, searching eagerly for the signs of passage or conflict—tokens that lie clearer than the printed page to the vision of the Children of the Waste. Yes! there were footmarks, deeply indented in places, as of men that bore a burden. Here was a fragment of a check shirt of the pattern the bush labourer mostly wears, there a scrap of paper; and at a turn in the thicket-bordered path a long-abandoned shaft came into view. Lower she bent, and lower still, scanned yet more earnestly the slight mark of impress, invisible save to eyesight keen as those of the wild tribes which had been wont to roam these lonely wastes.
'The grass is longer here,' she whispered to herself in low and ghastly tones. 'Something's been dragged this way; the edge of the shaft looks broken down. Oh, my God! poor Lance, poor fellow, is this what you've come to after all?'
With stern set lips and eyes dry yet burning with deep unsparing hate, she secured her horse to a sapling. Then lying flat upon the earth, leaned over the edge of the dark unfathomed pit, and gazed into its depths, half dreading what her boding fears had shaped. She called too, at first brokenly, then loudly on him by name—'but none answered.' The tree limbs they had cast down had been lately dragged a few paces. The recent mark did not escape her watchful eye. As she looked heavenward in her despair she caught sight of a soaring eagle. On an adjacent tree sat a detachment of crows; she knew too well what their presence portended.
She drew herself upward, then walked slowly, almost totteringly, toward the patient mare. But before reaching her she dropped suddenly on her knees, and raising her clasped hands cried aloud, 'As God Almighty hears me this day, I swear that I will take neither rest nor food until I've got the tracks of the murdering dogs that killed the man I loved. Oh, Lance, Lance! It was a bad day for you when we met first. But I'll have revenge on your murderers—revenge—blood for blood—cowards and thieves that they are. They had him crooked, I'll take my oath. And now, Lawrence Trevenna,' she said, rising from her knees, 'it's you or I for it—my life against yours to the bitter end,' she continued, in the same broken, muttering monologue which she had half unconsciously used since she had commenced to follow the trail of blood. Half mechanically she loosed the mare and remounted. Then, giving the reins a shake, the tireless animal dashed off at half speed—a pace from which her rider never slackened until she reined up, after the darkening eve had dimmed the outlines of forest and mountain, within sight of the lights of Omeo.
She had covered nearly seventy miles since daylight. Yet the fast gliding pace at which she rode up the main street indicated no trace of fatigue on the part of her hackney. For herself, every nerve seemed at fullest tension; she felt as if she could have ridden day and night for a week.
Attaching the bridle-rein to one of the iron staples with which the verandah of the chief hostelry was supplied, she went at once to the principal store, never very far from the hotel in country townships.