Gully was deep and pretty dark most times, and of course it
was haunted. Women and children wouldn't go through it after dark; and
even me, when I'd grown up, I'd hold my back pretty holler, and whistle,
and walk quick going along there at night-time. We're all afraid of
ghosts, but we won't let on.

'Some one had skinned a dead calf during the day and left it on the
track, and it gave me a jump, I promise you. It looked like two corpses
laid out naked. I finished the whisky and started up over the gap. All
of a sudden a great 'old man' kangaroo went across the track with a
thud-thud, and up the siding, and that startled me. Then the naked,
white glistening trunk of a stringy-bark tree, where some one had
stripped off a sheet of bark, started out from a bend in the track in a
shaft of moonlight, and that gave me a jerk. I was pretty shaky before
I started. There was a Chinaman's grave close by the track on the top
of the gap. An old chow had lived in a hut there for many years, and
fossicked on the old diggings, and one day he was found dead in the
hut, and the Government gave some one a pound to bury him. When I was a
nipper we reckoned that his ghost haunted the gap, and cursed in Chinese
because the bones hadn't been sent home to China. It was a lonely,
ghostly place enough.

'It had been a smotheringly hot day and very close coming across the
flats and up the gully--not a breath of air; but now as I got higher I
saw signs of the thunderstorm we'd expected all day, and felt the breath
of a warm breeze on my face. When I got into the top of the gap the
first thing I saw was something white amongst the dark bushes over the
spot where the Chinaman's grave was, and I stood staring at it with
both eyes. It moved out of the shadow presently, and I saw that it was
a white bullock, and I felt relieved. I'd hardly felt relieved when, all
at once, there came a "pat-pat-pat" of running feet close behind me!
I jumped round quick, but there was nothing there, and while I stood
staring all ways for Sunday, there came a "pat-pat", then a pause, and
then "pat-pat-pat-pat" behind me again: it was like some one dodging and
running off that time. I started to walk down the track pretty fast,
but hadn't gone a dozen yards when "pat-pat-pat", it was close behind me
again. I jerked my eyes over my shoulder but kept my legs going. There
was nothing behind, but I fancied I saw something slip into the Bush to
the right. It must have been t