Page 180 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

CHAPTER VIII. THE POWER

OF THE WILDERNESS.

he drifting log that had so strangely served as a means
Tof saving Rufus Dawes swam with the current that was
running out of the bay. For some time the burden that it
bore was an insensible one. Exhausted with his desperate
struggle for life, the convict lay along the rough back of this
Heaven-sent raft without motion, almost without breath.
At length a violent shock awoke him to consciousness, and
he perceived that the log had become stranded on a sandy
point, the extremity of which was lost in darkness. Pain-
fully raising himself from his uncomfortable posture, he
staggered to his feet, and crawling a few paces up the beach,
flung himself upon the ground and slept.
When morning dawned, he recognized his position. The
log had, in passing under the lee of Philip’s Island, been cast
upon the southern point of Coal Head; some three hun-
dred yards from him were the mutilated sheds of the coal
gang. For some time he lay still, basking in the warm rays
of the rising sun, and scarcely caring to move his bruised
and shattered limbs. The sensation of rest was so exquisite,
that it overpowered all other considerations, and he did not
even trouble himself to conjecture the reason for the appar-
ent desertion of the huts close by him. If there was no one

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