Part 41 (2/2)

Picking it up, he held it at arm's length. So the Rider was disguised after all!

The flimsy thing brought clearly back to him the features of the man as he had twice seen him. The close-clipped fair hair, the light sandy eyebrows, the peculiarly light lashes which gave so sinister an expression to the eyes, were distinct; but when he tried to reconstruct the face as it would be without the beard, he was baffled. The form of the nose, the moulding of the chin, the shape of the mouth, had been hidden by the disguise, and without a knowledge of them Durham could not grasp fully what the man was like. As Harding had expressed himself, when describing the face he had seen at the window of the bank, it was the impression of a familiar face disguised, and yet a familiar face which could not be located.

Beyond that he could not go.

He picked up the clothes and examined them. They were of nondescript grey, such as can be bought by the hundred at any bush store in Australia, and were similar to what the man was wearing the night he visited Waroona Downs. The hat was missing, as Durham expected it would be. The pockets were empty.

Replacing the articles as nearly as possible in the position in which he found them, Durham turned his attention to the cave itself.

The floor was rough and uneven. What sand cl.u.s.tered in the hollows was too much trampled upon to reveal any detail of the feet that had walked upon it.

There were innumerable nooks and crannies where articles could be stored, but in every instance they contained nothing. Nowhere could he find anything more than the clothes.

He went to the mouth and stood peering round to see if there was another similar cave near, but everywhere else the ground rose solid and unbroken.

In the open s.p.a.ce under the shelter of the bluff where the ground had been so much trampled by horses, the wheel-marks of a vehicle also showed. He walked over and examined them carefully.

They were the marks of what was evidently an old and rackety conveyance.

One of the wheels was loose and askew on the axle, with the result that it made a wobbly mark on the ground, while the tyres on all the wheels were uneven in width and badly worn.

”Almost as ancient as old Dudgeon's rattle-trap,” Durham said to himself as he looked at the marks.

The story, fanciful as he had regarded it at the time, of the buggy driven by two men with a pair of white horses, the story told by the travelling bushmen the day the bank robbery was discovered, recurred to him. If this was the vehicle in which the gold had been carried off, and the wheel-marks he was looking at had been made by it, then that gold was probably secreted somewhere in his immediate vicinity.

The thick-growing shrubs and stunted gums made it difficult for him to see far from where he stood. The level stretch along the margin of the pool showed clear enough, but around him the vegetation was so dense that, unless he had some clue to guide him, to prosecute a search within it was like trying the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.

During the time that had elapsed since those wheel-marks had been made they had been greatly obliterated, but it was still possible to distinguish where the vehicle had been stopped, for the horses had turned suddenly, and the wheels cut deep as they came round. He stepped to the spot. Later tramplings had removed all clear traces of footmarks.

Nothing was now to be learned from that source.

His eyes swept along the line of shrubs which fringed the open s.p.a.ce. A twig, snapped near the stem, dangled, its leaves brown and withered. It was a finger pointing where someone had forced a way through.

Durham went down on his knees beside the shrub. Near the root the bark had been stripped for a couple of inches, the scar showing brown, while in the soil the impression of a heavy boot was just distinguishable.

On hands and knees he pushed his way between the stems. Other footmarks, old and faint, showed, and he crept along with his eyes on them. Some weeks before there had evidently been much coming and going through the scrub at this point. Looking straight ahead he saw the grey sheen of a sun-dried log. He stood up. The thick undergrowth reached to his armpits, but through it, a couple of yards from where he stood, and ten from the spot where the wheel-marks turned, was the fallen trunk of an old dead tree.

Such a log, hollow for the greater part of its length and absolutely hidden by the shrubs growing round it, was exactly the place where anything could be secreted, and remain secreted, for an indefinite period.

Pus.h.i.+ng his way carefully through the tangle of shrubs he came upon it at the root end. It had evidently fallen in some bygone bush-fire, the jagged charred fragments showing where it had snapped off close to the ground. The fire had eaten its way into the heart of the timber and there was s.p.a.ce enough in the cavity for a man to crouch.

Stooping down, Durham peered into it. At the far end he saw, indistinctly, a confused ma.s.s, pushed up closely. He reached in, but could not touch it, without creeping into the opening.

He looked round for something that would serve as a rake to pull the articles out, but there was no loose stick sufficiently long near to hand, and he did not want to cut one. Higher up the bank he saw one that would suit his purpose and went to get it.

As he returned with it in his hand he saw, at the other end of the log, a patch of white on the ground. Going over to it he found it was caused by a chalky powder which cl.u.s.tered thickly near the tree.

This end of the log was also hollow, and in the cavity were a couple of bags which, when he pulled them out, he found to be full of the chalky powder.

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