black fellow smiled again, groped in his shirt, and pulled out a
dirty piece of folded paper. He held it in his hand and again looked
at the lad as if to make quite sure he was not being deceived.

"Boss Stobart, him say, you walk longa Oodnadatta. You find um my son.
You give 'im paper yabber. Him good fella, Boss Stobart, so I go. My
name Yarloo."

The words came slowly, as if the man were repeating something he had
said over and over in his mind. But the words were quite distinct.

He handed the "paper yabber" to Sax, and disappeared. The two friends
came close together round the candle and looked at the paper which had
come to them from the unknown by such a strange hand. For a few
moments Sax was too excited to open it. What was the news it
contained? Good or bad? It was not addressed, or, if it ever had
been, the handling to which it had been subjected had worn any writing
completely off the outside.

At last the lad opened it. It was a sheet torn from a common note-book
ruled with lines and columns for figures, the sort of thing on which a
rough man would keep his rough accounts. It contained writing in
pencil by a hand which Sax at once recognized as his father's; but it
was uneven as if it had been written in the dark. The words were:

"In difficulties. Musgrave Ranges. Tell
Oodnadatta trooper, but _no one else_." (These last three
words were underlined several times.) "He'll
understand. Boy quite reliable. Don't worry.
Get a job somewhere. "STOBART."

The friends read it to themselves, and then Sax read it out loud.

"'In difficulties'," said Vaughan. "What does that mean?"

"Blest if I know. With the cattle, I expect. I wonder where the
Musgrave Ranges are."

"But why does he say 'tell the trooper and no one else'?" asked Vaughan
again. "Yet he wouldn't say 'don't worry' if anything was up, would
he?"

"Oh, nothing's really up," said Sax with conviction. "He means he's a
bit late, that's all. P'raps the trooper's expecting him or something.
Of course he wouldn't want anybody else to know. You see, he's got a
name here," said the lad proudly. "They call him Boss Stobart. Even
the nigger did that."

"But he'll be a long time, Sax. He won't be in for a week or so at any
rate, or else he wouldn't tell us to get a job, would he?"

The boys discussed the news from every possible point of view, and
finally arrived at the conclusion that the famous dro