uidance he soon became a good bushman
with an ardent love of bush life. He took up several runs near the South
Australian border, and thenceforth became associated with that province.

In 1861 he was appointed leader of the South Australian relief party and
started from Adelaide on October 26th. On arriving at Blanche Water, he
heard a vague rumour from the blacks that white men and camels had been
seen at a distant inland water; but put little faith in the story. He
traversed Lake Torrens, and, striking north, crossed the lower end of
Cooper's Creek at a point where the main watercourse is lost in a maze of
channels. Here he learned definite and particular details respecting the
rumoured white men, and thinking there might be some groundwork of truth
in the report, he now pressed forward to the locality indicated. Having
formed a depot camp, he went ahead with two white men and a native.
Passing through a belt of country with numerous small shallow lakelets,
they came to a watercourse whereon they found signs of a grave, and they
picked up a battered pint-pot. Next morning, feeling sure that the ground
had been disturbed with a spade, they opened what proved to be a grave,
and in it found the body of a European, the skull marked, so McKinlay
states, with two sabre cuts. He noted down the description of the body,
the locality, and its surroundings; and in view of these particulars, it
has been stated that the body was that of Gray, who died in the
neighbourhood.*

*[Footnote.] See Chapter 14.

Considering the minute and circumstantial accounts that have from time to
time been related by the blacks concerning Leichhardt, one is not
astonished at the legends told to McKinlay. The native with him told him
that the whites had been attacked in their camp, and that the whole of
them had been murdered; the blacks having finished by eating the bodies
of the other men, and burying the journals, saddles, and similar portions
of the equipment beside a lake a short distance away. A further search
revealed another grave -- empty -- and there were other and slighter
indications that white men had visited the neighbourhood, so that
McKinlay was led to place some credence in this story.

Next morning a tribe of blacks appeared; and although they immediately
ran away on perceiving the party, one was captured who corroborated the
statement made by the other native. Both of them bore marks on them like
bullet and shot wounds. The secon