But a sudden thought arrested my mind. I was getting along a little too hastily. There might be another explanation of the sudden termination of this systematic scale of measurements at the height of four feet something. That last measurement might have had a black edge to it, in which case it occurred to me with a shade of sadness that its date might be found again burnt into some little wooden slab at the head of a grave four feet something in length, in a sheltered spot in the garden about the hut.
To exhaust this alternative I explained my discovery to Tiki, and together we went out and made a thorough search all over the tangled wilderness of a garden, but, to my great relief, found no such grave or wooden slab. It was more probable, I thought, judging from the deserted state of the place, and the growth of the quick-hedges since they had last been cut, that Grey and the child had left the hut somewhere about the year specified in the last measurement, nine years before the time of which I am writing.
“The little maiden is not dead,” said Tiki anxiously, when we had concluded our search; “no, she is not dead. We should have counted another star in the sky, if the little maiden had passed over Wai Ora Tane.”
“She is not buried here at all events,” I replied with dry logic, which I fear compared but poorly with the poetical thought of the Maori. Then we found the bullock-dray road and set out on our tramp.
Overgrown, bestrewn with débris from the thick bush, and in parts almost impassable, it led straight down into the south-west, and when we had followed it for two or three miles it opened out into another dray road which was in good repair. Here we found fresh bullock tracks, with the ruts of dray wheels, and after travelling some five miles in our right direction with the rising sun behind us, we heard a sound of ‘language’ ahead. It was the bullock-puncher talking in his most persuasive tone to his long-suffering team.
Presently, turning a slight bend in the road, we came up with him—a raw Irishman of the lankiest, boniest type imaginable, with fiery hair and a nose that had been blunted in Heke’s war in the ’forties. His trousers were not what they used to be; his boots were eighteen by four; his shirt should have been at the binder’s in several places, except where it was fashionably fastened at the collar with a tie of undressed flax clean that day from Nature’s laundry; his socks, which one looked for in vain between the bottoms of his trousers and the tops of his boots, were at the wash; and his clay pipe, stuck like a dagger in his belt of raw bullock’s hide, looked as if it wanted renewing; but—his language was divine, I mean profane, and his whip, as it curled in air and dusted last year’s hair from the leader’s flank, was eloquent with the sublimity of perfect punctuation.
I was drawing out this bullock-puncher, when the off leader stopped, and, turning his lowered head to the right, gave a violent snort that scattered the dust and dry leaves from the ground. In a trice the great whip was unfolding itself in the air, and, as it came down on the startled bullock’s flank, the well of Irish much defiled overflowed its banks; but, in the confusion, I heard distinctly from far away the same wild, mocking laugh of my nightmare. Again I asked myself if I was haunted, and if so what earthly or unearthly thing had scared the bullock at that moment. Again I could make nothing of it, and dismissed the matter from my mind.
We walked by the side of this son of Erin for a mile, and I learned in the course of conversation that there was a small digging township ten miles further on. Seeing that he could not talk to his bullocks properly with anyone else constantly interrupting the thread of his argument, and that he neither knew anything about Grey nor could tell me who had last lived in the hut on the river bank, we soon left him behind, coming along slowly to the tune of “Woo comother byke—Skipper! byke—Skipper!! ye (crack) byke! Skipper!!!” which tune had no “grand Amen” in it, but went on and on until, as we drew ahead, it died away further and further in the distance.
Towards evening we reached the digging township—a quaint, mushroom growth of tents and rough wooden buildings. Here I began my inquiries, but no one could give me any information. The floating population of the gold diggings was not an easy field in which to find traces of a man who had probably left the district ten years before. The Hindu saying, “A piece of wood and a piece of wood may meet in the ocean, and having touched, float away again—like this is the meeting of mortals,” is especially true in a gold-seeking world, where men come from everywhere, and drift about between California, Bendigo, and New Zealand. But late that night chance favoured me. I dropped into the tap-room of an accommodation house a little way out of the township, and put my inquiries to the landlord. He shook his head, then turning to the ten or twelve occupants of the room who were playing euchre at a large table, he addressed them collectively.
“Say, do any of you chaps know anything of a man named Grey, who lived in these parts about ten years ago?”