looked up at
all that wealth and knew it was his--his, if only he could take it away.

He turned his head and looked at the skulls. Each bleached remains of
what had once been the head of a courageous man was looking at him out
of empty eye-sockets. The jaws had been propped open and seemed to be
laughing with ghastly dead mirth into the face of the living man.
Stobart's imagination began to play tricks with him, for when he turned
his eyes away, the glances of the skulls seemed to turn also.

He plunged his head once more into water and leaned over till his chest
and arms were covered. His hands groped about in the cool sand, and
when he pulled them out again they were full of wet sand. The sun's
rays caught it and struck a thousand flashes from the grains. They
looked unusually yellow and bright. Stobart turned the sand over and
let it run between his fingers. It was like grains of sunlight. He
thought that his overwrought nerves were deceiving him, and picked up
another handful. It behaved exactly in the same way. It glinted and
flashed yellow in a way that no sand could ever do. All at once it
dawned upon him. This was no trick of sunlight on wet sand. This was
no make-believe of tired nerves.

The sand of that water-hole was gold!

The white man stood up. He had no tools with which to work at the
boulders for specimens to take away with him when he escaped. But here
was gold, some of which could easily be hidden on his person to prove,
to anybody who might doubt his story, that he alone of all men had
solved the mystery of the Musgraves and had returned again to the
haunts of men of his own colour. He stooped to gather another handful,
and as he did so something whirled through the air and fell in the
water in front of him. He jumped back quickly. The water was clear,
for the grains of golden sand had settled and left no mud.

It was an old horseshoe! Surely the place was bewitched. He looked
round, wondering what next would happen. Suddenly another horseshoe
came from a clump of low bushes nearly a hundred yards up the gully.
Stobart saw it coming and dodged it. It fell at his feet and he picked
it up. He was a good tracker and knew it at once. That shoe had made
one of the tracks which he had seen in the clay. There was no doubt
about it.

The sense of a supernatural foe, which was making a coward of the brave
white man, left him all at once. Evil spirits do not play with old
rus