. His ideas were centred
mainly on Mr. Cumshaw. True, that gentleman had disappeared over the
horizon with every mark of unseemly haste, and already he must be well
advanced on whatever road he was taking. Not so very far away the car
awaited Bryce, and he was sure that, once he reached it, it would be
merely a matter of a day or so until he rediscovered Mr. Cumshaw. He
repeated the verb. "Re-discovered" struck a distinctive note. One could
not convey the same meaning with any form of the verb "to overtake;" Mr.
Cumshaw had disappeared, not simply gone on ahead. He chuckled softly at
his own quaint conceit, and at that his spirits began to rise again.

Feeling now fully rested, he rose to his feet and swung out on the track
with that long slow stride which was all that remained of his athletic
form of the old New Guinea days. Of late years he had walked, when he
had walked at all, with the quick nervous step of the city-bred man, and
it heartened him immensely to know that he was recovering without any
effort of his volition the old easy pioneer stride.

It is not within the scope of this tale to relate how Mr. Bryce at
length reached his car and set out on what he believed to be Abel
Cumshaw's trail. Suffice it to state that he reached his machine without
any untoward incident, the two gentlemen who had so rudely disturbed the
serenity of his nature having seemingly disappeared from the face of the
earth. Once he passed a drover and elicited from him that a man
answering Cumshaw's description had passed him on the road the previous
morning. Evidently then the missing man was keeping away from the towns,
taking instead a trail that would inevitably lead him further into the
bush. He was rather pleased at this. Abel Cumshaw in the city would be
as hard to find as the proverbial needle in a bundle of hay, but in the
bush it would be much easier to locate him, Bryce considered. So he
drove the car along at a low speed, keeping all the time a watchful eye
out for any signs of the truant. As he progressed he was surprised and
not a little pleased to find that his New Guinea woodcraft was coming
back to him by degrees. The joy of the chase was his, and he experienced
again the same keen and primitive emotions that had thrilled him in the
days when the elder Carstairs and he had trodden the unexplored wilds of
Papua.

* * * * *

He came upon Cumshaw very suddenly. The car was creeping through