“Well enough to have some sort of light,” he told himself.
There was a flashlight on a beam in the very cabin against which his bench rested. To secure that and to try it out by a flash on the floor was but the work of a moment.
Upon returning to the bench he felt a little more secure. As he sat down his foot struck something and sent it to the ground with a thud.
“The machete,” he thought.
Picking it up, he examined it curiously. On the horn handle of this bushman’s sword he discovered the initials, S. P.
“Seperino Petillo,” he said with a start. “So it was Petillo. I was not mistaken.”
His mind was in a whirl. Petillo, a half-caste Spaniard, had been his foreman. Surely, this was a strange land. The very man to whom he had given position and standing among his people had, apparently, tried to kill him.
For some time he sat there thinking and his thoughts were long, long thoughts.
The red lure was all about him. The smell of it was in his nostrils.
Yet, less than a third of their work was done. To establish a camp, to build cabins from the trunks and leaves of the cohune nut tree, to cut paths and roads, all this had taken time. A few weeks more and they would have been drifting silently downstream with their red treasure.