The drifting log that had so strangely served as a means of saving RufusDawes swam with the current that was running out of the bay. For sometime the burden that it bore was an insensible one. Exhausted with hisdesperate struggle for life, the convict lay along the rough back ofthis Heaven-sent raft without motion, almost without breath. At length aviolent shock awoke him to consciousness, and he perceived that the loghad become stranded on a sandy point, the extremity of which was lost indarkness. Painfully raising himself from his uncomfortable posture,he staggered to his feet, and crawling a few paces up the beach, flunghimself upon the ground and slept.
When morning dawned, he recognized his position. The log had, in passingunder the lee of Philip's Island, been cast upon the southern point ofCoal Head; some three hundred yards from him were the mutilated sheds ofthe coal gang. For some time he lay still, basking in the warm rays ofthe rising sun, and scarcely caring to move his bruised and shatteredlimbs. The sensation of rest was so exquisite, that it overpowered allother considerations, and he did not even trouble himself to conjecturethe reason for the apparent desertion of the huts close by him. If therewas no one there--well and good. If the coal party had not gone, hewould be discovered in a few moments, and brought back to his islandprison. In his exhaustion and misery, he accepted the alternative andslept again.
As he laid down his aching head, Mr. Troke was reporting his death toVickers, and while he still slept, the Ladybird, on her way out, passedhim so closely that any one on board her might, with a good glass, haveespied his slumbering figure as it lay upon the sand.
When he woke it was past midday, and the sun poured its full rays uponhim. His clothes were dry in all places, save the side on which he hadbeen lying, and he rose to his feet refreshed by his long sleep. Hescarcely comprehended, as yet, his true position. He had escaped, itwas true, but not for long. He was versed in the history of escapes,and knew that a man alone on that barren coast was face to face withstarvation or recapture. Glancing up at the sun, he wondered indeed,how it was that he had been free so long. Then the coal sheds caught hiseye, and he understood that they were untenanted. This astonished him,and he began to tremble with vague apprehension. Entering, he lookedaround, expecting every moment to see some lurking constable, or armedsoldier. Suddenly his glance fell upon the food rations which lay in thecorner where the departing convicts had flung them the night before.At such a moment, this discovery seemed like a direct revelation fromHeaven. He would not have been surprised had they disappeared. Had helived in another age, he would have looked round for the angel who hadbrought them.
By and by, having eaten of this miraculous provender, the poor creaturebegan--reckoning by his convict experience--to understand what had takenplace. The coal workings were abandoned; the new Commandant had probablyother work for his beasts of burden to execute, and an absconder wouldbe safe here for a few hours at least. But he must not stay. For himthere was no rest. If he thought to escape, it behoved him to commencehis journey at once. As he contemplated the meat and bread, somethinglike a ray of hope entered his gloomy soul. Here was provision for hisneeds. The food before him represented the rations of six men. Was itnot possible to cross the desert that lay between him and freedom onsuch fare? The very supposition made his heart beat faster. It surelywas possible. He must husband his resources; walk much and eat little;spread out the food for one day into the food for three. Here was sixmen's food for one day, or one man's food for six days. He would live ona third of this, and he would have rations for eighteen days. Eighteendays! What could he not do in eighteen days? He could walk thirty milesa day--forty miles a day--that would be six hundred miles and more. Yetstay; he must not be too sanguine; the road was difficult; the scrub wasin places impenetrable. He would have to make detours, and turn uponhis tracks, to waste precious time. He would be moderate, and say twentymiles a day. Twenty miles a day was very easy walking. Taking a pieceof stick from the ground, he made the calculation in the sand. Eighteendays, and twenty miles a day--three hundred and sixty miles. More thanenough to take him to freedom. It could be done! With prudence, it couldbe done! He must be careful and abstemious! Abstemious! He had alreadyeaten too much, and he hastily pulled a barely-tasted piece of meat fromhis mouth, and replaced it with the rest. The action which at anyother time would have seemed disgusting, was, in the case of this poorcreature, merely pitiable.
Having come to this resolution, the next thing was to disencumberhimself of his irons. This was more easily done than he expected. Hefound in the shed an iron gad, and with that and a stone he drove outthe rivets. The rings were too strong to be "ovalled", * or he wouldhave been free long ago. He packed the meat and bread together, andthen pushing the gad into his belt--it might be needed as a weapon ofdefence--he set out on his journey.
* Ovalled--"To oval" is a term in use among convicts, and means so to bend the round ring of the ankle fetter that the heel can be drawn up through it.
His intention was to get round the settlement to the coast, reach thesettled districts, and, by some tale of shipwreck or of wandering,procure assistance. As to what was particularly to be done when he foundhimself among free men, he did not pause to consider. At that point hisdifficulties seemed to him to end. Let him but traverse the desert thatwas before him, and he would trust to his own ingenuity, or the chanceof fortune, to avert suspicion. The peril of immediate detection wasso imminent that, beside it, all other fears were dwarfed intoinsignificance.
Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles, and by husbandinghis food, he succeeded by the night of the fourth day in accomplishingforty more. Footsore and weary, he lay in a thicket of the thornymelaleuca, and felt at last that he was beyond pursuit. The next day headvanced more slowly. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savagejungle impeded his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose beforehim. He was lost in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered inmorasses. The sea that had hitherto gleamed, salt, glittering, andhungry upon his right hand, now shifted to his left. He had mistaken hiscourse, 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 bluntpinnacle the clustering bush. He must go over or round this obstacle,and he decided to go round it. A natural pathway wound about its foot.Here and there branches were broken, and it seemed to the poor wretch,fainting under the weight of his lessening burden, that his were not thefirst footsteps which had trodden there. The path terminated in a glade,and at the bottom of this glade was something that fluttered. RufusDawes pressed forward, and stumbled over a corpse!
In the terrible stillness of that solitary place he felt suddenly asthough a voice had called to him. All the hideous fantastic tales ofmurder which he had read or heard seemed to take visible shape in theperson of the loathly carcase before him, clad in the yellow dress of aconvict, 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 hadbeen beaten in by some heavy instrument! The first thought--that thisheap of rags and bones was a mute witness to the folly of his ownundertaking, the corpse of some starved absconder--gave place to asecond more horrible suspicion. He recognized the number imprinted onthe coarse cloth as that which had designated the younger of the twomen who had escaped with Gabbett. He was standing on the place where amurder had been committed! A murder!--and what else? Thank God thefood he carried was not yet exhausted! He turned and fled, looking backfearfully as he went. He could not breathe in the shadow of that awfulmountain.
Crashing through scrub and brake, torn, bleeding, and wild with terror,he reached a spur on the range, and looked around him. Above him rosethe iron hills, below him lay the panorama of the bush. The white coneof the Frenchman's Cap was on his right hand, on his left a successionof ranges seemed to bar further progress. A gleam, as of a lake,streaked the eastward. Gigantic pine trees reared their graceful headsagainst the opal of the evening sky,
and at their feet the dense scrubthrough which he had so painfully toiled, spread without break andwithout flaw. It seemed as though he could leap from where he stood upona solid mass of tree-tops. He raised his eyes, and right against him,like a long dull sword, lay the narrow steel-blue reach of the harbourfrom which he had escaped. One darker speck moved on the dark water.It was the Osprey making for the Gates. It seemed that he could throwa stone upon her deck. A faint cry of rage escaped him. During the lastthree days in the bush he must have retraced his steps, and returnedupon his own track to the settlement! More than half his allotted timehad passed, and he was not yet thirty miles from his prison. Death hadwaited to overtake him in this barbarous wilderness. As a cat allows amouse to escape her for a while, so had he been permitted to trifle withhis fate, and lull himself into a false security. Escape was hopelessnow. He never could escape; and as the unhappy man raised his despairingeyes, he saw that the sun, redly sinking behind a lofty pine whichtopped the opposite hill, shot a ray of crimson light into the gladebelow him. It was as though a bloody finger pointed at the corpse whichlay there, and Rufus Dawes, shuddering at the dismal omen, averting hisface, plunged again into the forest.
For four days he wandered aimlessly through the bush. He had given upall hopes of making the overland journey, and yet, as long as his scantysupply of food held out, he strove to keep away from the settlement.Unable to resist the pangs of hunger, he had increased his daily ration;and though the salted meat, exposed to rain and heat, had begun to turnputrid, he never looked at it but he was seized with a desire to eat hisfill. The coarse lumps of carrion and the hard rye-loaves were to himdelicious morsels fit for the table of an emperor. Once or twice hewas constrained to pluck and eat the tops of tea-trees and peppermintshrubs. These had an aromatic taste, and sufficed to stay the cravingsof hunger for a while, but they induced a raging thirst, which he slakedat the icy mountain springs. Had it not been for the frequency of thesestreams, he must have died in a few days. At last, on the twelfth dayfrom his departure from the Coal Head, he found himself at the foot ofMount Direction, at the head of the peninsula which makes the westernside of the harbour. His terrible wandering had but led him to make acomplete circuit of the settlement, and the next night brought himround the shores of Birches Inlet to the landing-place opposite to SarahIsland. His stock of provisions had been exhausted for two days, and hewas savage with hunger. He no longer thought of suicide. His dominantidea was now to get food. He would do as many others had done beforehim--give himself up to be flogged and fed. When he reached thelanding-place, however, the guard-house was empty. He looked across atthe island prison, and saw no sign of life. The settlement was deserted!The shock of this discovery almost deprived him of reason. For days,that had seemed centuries, he had kept life in his jaded and laceratedbody solely by the strength of his fierce determination to reachthe settlement; and now that he had reached it, after a journey ofunparalleled horror, he found it deserted. He struck himself to see ifhe was not dreaming. He refused to believe his eyesight. He shouted,screamed, and waved his tattered garments in the air. Exhausted by theseparoxysms, he said to himself, quite calmly, that the sun beating onhis unprotected head had dazed his brain, and that in a few minutes heshould see well-remembered boats pulling towards him. Then, when no boatcame, he argued that he was mistaken in the place; the island yonder wasnot Sarah Island, but some other island like it, and that in a secondor so he would be able to detect the difference. But the inexorablemountains, so hideously familiar for six weary years, made mutereply, and the sea, crawling at his feet, seemed to grin at him witha thin-lipped, hungry mouth. Yet the fact of the desertion seemed soinexplicable that he could not realize it. He felt as might have feltthat wanderer in the enchanted mountains, who, returning in the morningto look for his companions, found them turned to stone.
At last the dreadful truth forced itself upon him; he retired a fewpaces, and then, with a horrible cry of furious despair, stumbledforward towards the edge of the little reef that fringed the shore.Just as he was about to fling himself for the second time into the darkwater, his eyes, sweeping in a last long look around the bay, caughtsight of a strange appearance on the left horn of the sea beach. A thin,blue streak, uprising from behind the western arm of the little inlet,hung in the still air. It was the smoke of a fire!
The dying wretch felt inspired with new hope. God had sent him a directsign from Heaven. The tiny column of bluish vapour seemed to him asglorious as the Pillar of Fire that led the Israelites. There were yethuman beings near him!--and turning his face from the hungry sea,he tottered with the last effort of his failing strength towards theblessed token of their presence.
CHAPTER IX. THE SEIZURE OF THE "OSPREY"
For the Term of His Natural Life Page 21