Tortured by disappointment and despair, racked by starvation and disease, he lay in the desert dying.
Flinging aside the last poor chance of succour, renouncing all hope that he might yet live to reap the reward of his brilliant dash across the continent, he met death
'With the pistol clenched in his failing hand,
With the death mist spread o'er his fading eyes
He saw the sun go down on the sand,
And he slept—and never saw it rise.'
King lingered near the spot for a few hours; but at last, feeling it to be useless, he went on up the Creek to look for the natives.
In one of their deserted mia-mias he found a large store of the nardoo seed, and, carrying it with him, returned to Wills.
On his way back he shot three crows. This addition to their food would, he felt, give them a chance of tiding over their difficulties until the blacks could again be found. But as he drew near the mia-mia where he and poor Burke had left Wills a few days before, and saw his lonely figure in the distance lying much as they had left him, a sudden fear came upon him.
Hitherto the awful quiet of these desolate scenes had little impressed him, and now it came upon him heavily. The shrilling of a solitary locust somewhere in the gums, the brisk crackle of dry bark and twigs as he trod, the melancholy sighing of the wind-stirred leafage, offered him those inexplicable contrasts that give stress to silence.
Anxious to escape thoughts so little comprehended, King hurried on, and essayed a feeble 'cooee' when a few yards from the sleeper. No answering sound or gesture greeted him.
Wills had fallen peacefully asleep for ever.
Footprints on the sand showed that the blacks had already been there, and after King had buried the corpse with sand and rushes as well as he was able, he started to follow their tracks.