Part 26 (2/2)
He made no comment on my unceremonious interruption, but the strange half-smile he gave me showed that he realised in part at least how his story had affected me. As a matter of fact I was more perturbed than I cared to admit. I had been thinking things over all day, and it had just occurred to me that, seeing we had heard nothing of them since Bryce's death, it was quite possible that they were even now following up the false clue that he had laid for them, and which one of them had got away with the night of the burglary. If that were so, why had they come back and killed Bryce? It was a curious enough situation, and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that I was right. Our immunity so far was due solely to the fact that the others were well occupied with the faked plan they had stolen on that memorable evening.
Now on top of that Albert c.u.mshaw must come with this circ.u.mstantial story of his and upset all my deductions. The strange part of it was, though my reason told me that he had been a victim of his own brilliant imagination, part of my mind--that part that believed in second sight and banshees and were-wolves, and stuff of that sort--told me that he was not so very much wrong after all.
”I'll get to sleep,” he said, interrupting the train of my thoughts.
”I'll be fresh when my turn comes for guard.”
”Tell me,” I said, for the matter had been puzzling me all night, ”where did you learn to light your pipe with red-hot coals?”
”Oh, that,” he said with a laugh. ”I saw you doing it earlier in the evening, and I made up my mind that what you did I could do.”
”Then it must have burnt you.”
”Horribly,” he said with a grimace. ”Good-night.”
CHAPTER III.
THE PROMISED LAND.
”This,” I remarked, ”is the sort of country Adam Lindsay Gordon would have loved. No man but he could do justice to it.”
”We've been out seven days,” said c.u.mshaw, ”we've travelled G.o.d knows how many miles, we've climbed up a Hades of a lot of mountains, and I don't think there's a blind creek for twenty miles that we haven't followed to the end and back again, and at the end of it all we're no nearer the Valley than we were when we started. Gordon might have made an epic out of it, but I'm hanged if I'm poet enough to appreciate the country or philosopher enough to ignore the sheer physical discomforts of the journey.”
”If you'd been through the things I've been through,” I a.s.serted, ”if you'd been in New Guinea when there was a gold-strike on and had to climb hundreds of feet up a straight cliff to get to the fields, hanging on all the time to creepers as thick as your wrist, you'd think this was just Paradise. If you'd been with me in the sweltering Solomon Island jungle, where every breath you took made the perspiration stand out on your forehead in big beads, or up in the Klond.y.k.e when it was fifty below and a man's own breath turned into ice about his mouth, you'd know what life really meant. Here you're in the Garden of Victoria; you see sights that knock some of the beauty spots of the world into a c.o.c.ked hat, and all you can do is growl at the country. You can't expect to go up and down the mountain side in a lift or anything of the sort.”
”It's all very well for you to talk like that,” he objected. ”You're used to this kind of life; we're not. That makes all the difference.”
”So it seems,” I said. ”But I haven't the slightest intention of giving in yet. As a matter of fact I rather think we've been a little too sure that we were on the right track. We haven't been as careful as we might.
We've gone along blindly.”
”What do you mean?” he demanded.
”Just this. We've been so infernally confident that we only had to find a clump of wattle and a lone tree, and we were there. Now that lone tree must be somewhere on the east side of the valley, and, despite the fact that it's on high ground, it's so hidden that we wouldn't see it until we were almost on top of it. It might be perfectly visible from inside the valley, and at the same time be hidden from the outside by another hill. As for the wattle, has it ever struck you that wattle only begins to spring into bloom about the end of August? It's almost April now, and you wouldn't find anything but just a ma.s.s of green bushes.”
”If there was a valley, which same I'm beginning to doubt,” c.u.mshaw said doggedly, ”we'd have found it before this.”
”I don't know what Miss Drummond is cooking for our tea,” I remarked irrelevantly, ”but it smells good.”
”If you think you can put me off that way,” c.u.mshaw said, ”you're mighty mistaken. I'm tired of it all, and for two pins----”
”You know very well,” I cut in, ”that I haven't one pin, let alone two.”
”You apparently don't understand that I'm perfectly serious.”
”Yes, I do. I'm serious too. I'm quite satisfied that we haven't been going about things in the right way. We've made mistakes, and it's up to us to find out what those mistakes are and go over the ground again.”
”I'll give it another week,” said c.u.mshaw, ”and if we haven't found anything by then we might as well retire, for you can bet your sweet life we never will.”
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