.
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 the
first footsteps which had trodden there. The path terminated in a glade,
and at the bottom of this glade was something that fluttered. Rufus
Dawes pressed forward, and stumbled over a corpse!

In the terrible stillness of that solitary place he felt suddenly as
though a voice had called to him. All the hideous fantastic tales of
murder which he had read or heard seemed to take visible shape in the
person of the loathly carcase before him, clad in the yellow dress of a
convict, 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 had
been beaten in by some heavy instrument! The first thought--that this
heap of rags and bones was a mute witness to the folly of his own
undertaking, the corpse of some starved absconder--gave place to a
second more horrible suspicion. He recognized the number imprinted on
the coarse cloth as that which had designated the younger of the two
men who had escaped with Gabbett. He was standing on the place where a
murder had been committed! A murder!--and what else? Thank God the
food he carried was not yet exhausted! He turned and fled, looking back
fearfully as he went. He could not breathe in the shadow of that awful
mountain.

Crashing through scrub and brake, torn, bleeding, and wild with terror,
he reached a spur on the range, and looked around him. Above him rose
the iron hills, below him lay the panorama of the bush. The white cone
of the Frenchman's Cap was on his right hand, on his left a succession
of ranges seemed to bar further progress. A gleam, as of a lake,
streaked the eastward. Gigantic pine trees reared their graceful heads
against the opal of the evening sky, and at their feet the dense scrub
through which he had so painfully toiled, spread without break and
without flaw. It seemed as though he could leap from where he stood upon
a 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 harbour
from 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 throw
a stone upon her deck. A faint cry of rage escaped him. During the last
three days