Page 184 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

the fourth day in accomplishing forty more. Footsore and
weary, he lay in a thicket of the thorny melaleuca, and felt at
last that he was beyond pursuit. The next day he advanced
more slowly. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and
savage jungle impeded his path; barren and stony mountain
ranges arose before him. He was lost in gullies, entangled in
thickets, bewildered in morasses. The sea that had hitherto
gleamed, salt, glittering, and hungry upon his right hand,
now shifted to his left. He had mistaken his course, and he
must turn again. For two days did this bewilderment last,
and on the third he came to a mighty cliff that pierced with
its blunt pinnacle the clustering bush. He must go over or
round this obstacle, and he decided to go round it. A natu-
ral pathway wound about its foot. Here and there branches
were broken, and it seemed to the poor wretch, fainting un-
der the weight of his lessening burden, that his were not the
first footsteps which had trodden there. The path terminat-
ed in a glade, and at the bottom of this glade was something
that fluttered. Rufus Dawes pressed forward, and stumbled
over a corpse!
In the terrible stillness of that solitary place he felt
suddenly as though a voice had called to him. All the hid-
eous fantastic tales of murder which he had read or heard
seemed to take visible shape in the person of the loathly
carcase before him, clad in the yellow dress of a convict,
and lying flung together on the ground as though struck
down. Stooping over it, impelled by an irresistible impulse
to know the worst, he found the body was mangled. One
arm was missing, and the skull had been beaten in by some

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