Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/197

 track towards me and stopped. My God, what a face it was! No devil out of hell could have looked more fiendish than he did. It was like no human face I'd ever seen. I began to think I was asleep, and dreaming of a story in a book.

'They were not more than twenty yards from where I stood. My heart beat that loud I was afraid they'd hear it. My hair stood on end, if any one's ever did, while as the tall, dark man began to poke the fire again, and pushed something further into it that was not a log of wood, I deuced near fainted, and beads of perspiration rolled down my forehead and face. What did I see that caused every drop of blood in my veins to turn to ice? What the strange man stirred in the fire, making the sparks to fly all round among the red glowing embers, was a corpse! There was no mistaking the dreadful shape. One arm stuck out. The legs were there, the skull blackened and featureless, and, Heavenly Father! beyond and in the middle of the heap of glowing embers lay another shape huddled together, and showing no angle of limb or bone. The other man, with a broom of boughs tied together, was busy sweeping in all the pieces of charcoal, so as to prevent the flame from spreading through the tall, dry grass. At a short distance I could make out a tilted cart, such as hawkers use in the bush. "By !" said the man with the pole, "I'll swear I heard a stick crack. Any traveller as come to the water-hole and followed the track up, 'll have to be rubbed out, and no two ways about it. It will be our lives against his!"

Haven't we had blood enough for one day?" says the other man. "By George! when I think of these two poor chaps' faces, just afore you dropped 'em with the axe, I'd give all we've made ten times over to have 'em alive again."

You always was a snivelling beggar," says the tall man. "If you'd had your back scratched at Port Arthur half as often as me, you'd think no more of a man's life than a wild dog's. I believe it must 'a been one or a wallaby as made the stir."

'I've faced a trifle of danger, and seen some "close calls" in my time, but nothing came near that half-hour I spent there till I could make myself steady enough to stir. I couldn't sit;