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<h2> CHAPTER VIII. THE POWER OF THE WILDERNESS. </h2>
<p>The drifting log that had so strangely served as a means of saving Rufus
Dawes swam with the current that was running out of the bay. For some time
the burden that it bore was an insensible one. Exhausted with his
desperate struggle for life, the convict lay along the rough back of this
Heaven-sent raft without motion, almost without breath. At length a
violent shock awoke him to consciousness, and he perceived that the log
had become stranded on a sandy point, the extremity of which was lost in
darkness. Painfully raising himself from his uncomfortable posture, he
staggered to his feet, and crawling a few paces up the beach, flung
himself upon the ground and slept.</p>
<p>When morning dawned, he recognized his position. The log had, in passing
under the lee of Philip's Island, been cast upon the southern point of
Coal Head; some three hundred yards from him were the mutilated sheds of
the coal gang. For some time he lay still, basking in the warm rays of the
rising sun, and scarcely caring to move his bruised and shattered limbs.
The sensation of rest was so exquisite, that it overpowered all other
considerations, and he did not even trouble himself to conjecture the
reason for the apparent desertion of the huts close by him. If there was
no one there—well and good. If the coal party had not gone, he would
be discovered in a few moments, and brought back to his island prison. In
his exhaustion and misery, he accepted the alternative and slept again.</p>
<p>As he laid down his aching head, Mr. Troke was reporting his death to
Vickers, and while he still slept, the Ladybird, on her way out, passed
him so closely that any one on board her might, with a good glass, have
espied his slumbering figure as it lay upon the sand.</p>
<p>When he woke it was past midday, and the sun poured its full rays upon
him. His clothes were dry in all places, save the side on which he had
been lying, and he rose to his feet refreshed by his long sleep. He
scarcely comprehended, as yet, his true position. He had escaped, it was
true, but not for long. He was versed in the history of escapes, and knew
that a man alone on that barren coast was face to face with starvation or
recapture. Glancing up at the sun, he wondered indeed, how it was that he
had been free so long. Then the coal sheds caught his eye, and he
understood that they were untenanted. This astonished him, and he began to
tremble with vague apprehension. Entering, he looked around, expecting
every moment to see some lurking constable, or armed soldier. Suddenly his
glance fell upon the food rations which lay in the corner where the
departing convicts had flung them the night before. At such a moment, this
discovery seemed like a direct revelation from Heaven. He would not have
been surprised had they disappeared. Had he lived in another age, he would
have looked round for the angel who had brought them.</p>
<p>By and by, having eaten of this miraculous provender, the poor creature
began—reckoning by his convict experience—to understand what
had taken place. The coal workings were abandoned; the new Commandant had
probably other work for his beasts of burden to execute, and an absconder
would be safe here for a few hours at least. But he must not stay. For him
there was no rest. If he thought to escape, it behoved him to commence his
journey at once. As he contemplated the meat and bread, something like a
ray of hope entered his gloomy soul. Here was provision for his needs. The
food before him represented the rations of six men. Was it not possible to
cross the desert that lay between him and freedom on such fare? The very
supposition made his heart beat faster. It surely was possible. He must
husband his resources; walk much and eat little; spread out the food for
one day into the food for three. Here was six men's food for one day, or
one man's food for six days. He would live on a third of this, and he
would have rations for eighteen days. Eighteen days! What could he not do
in eighteen days? He could walk thirty miles a day—forty miles a day—that
would be six hundred miles and more. Yet stay; he must not be too
sanguine; the road was difficult; the scrub was in places impenetrable. He
would have to make d�tours, and turn upon his tracks, to waste precious
time. He would be moderate, and say twenty miles a day. Twenty miles a day
was very easy walking. Taking a piece of stick from the ground, he made
the calculation in the sand. Eighteen days, and twenty miles a day—three
hundred and sixty miles. More than enough to take him to freedom. It could
be done! With prudence, it could be done! He must be careful and
abstemious! Abstemious! He had already eaten too much, and he hastily
pulled a barely-tasted piece of meat from his mouth, and replaced it with
the rest. The action which at any other time would have seemed disgusting,
was, in the case of this poor creature, merely pitiable.</p>
<p>Having come to this resolution, the next thing was to disencumber himself
of his irons. This was more easily done than he expected. He found in the
shed an iron gad, and with that and a stone he drove out the rivets. The
rings were too strong to be "ovalled", * or he would have been free long
ago. He packed the meat and bread together, and then pushing the gad into
his belt—it might be needed as a weapon of defence—he set out
on his journey.</p>
<p>* Ovalled—"To oval" is a term in use among convicts, and<br/>
means so to bend the round ring of the ankle fetter that the<br/>
heel can be drawn up through it.<br/></p>
<p>His intention was to get round the settlement to the coast, reach the
settled districts, and, by some tale of shipwreck or of wandering, procure
assistance. As to what was particularly to be done when he found himself
among free men, he did not pause to consider. At that point his
difficulties seemed to him to end. Let him but traverse the desert that
was before him, and he would trust to his own ingenuity, or the chance of
fortune, to avert suspicion. The peril of immediate detection was so
imminent that, beside it, all other fears were dwarfed into
insignificance.</p>
<p>Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles, and by husbanding his
food, he succeeded by the night of the fourth day in accomplishing forty
more. Footsore and weary, he lay in a thicket of the thorny melaleuca, and
felt at last that he was beyond pursuit. The next day he advanced more
slowly. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savage jungle impeded
his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose before him. He was lost
in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in morasses. The sea that
had hitherto gleamed, salt, glittering, and hungry upon his right hand,
now shifted to his left. He had mistaken his course, and he must turn
again. For two days did this bewilderment last, and on the third he came
to a mighty cliff that pierced with its blunt pinnacle the clustering
bush. He must go over or round this obstacle, and he decided to go round
it. A natural pathway wound about its foot. 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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 in the bush he must have
retraced his steps, and returned upon his own track to the settlement!
More than half his allotted time had passed, and he was not yet thirty
miles from his prison. Death had waited to overtake him in this barbarous
wilderness. As a cat allows a mouse to escape her for a while, so had he
been permitted to trifle with his fate, and lull himself into a false
security. Escape was hopeless now. He never could escape; and as the
unhappy man raised his despairing eyes, he saw that the sun, redly sinking
behind a lofty pine which topped the opposite hill, shot a ray of crimson
light into the glade below him. It was as though a bloody finger pointed
at the corpse which lay there, and Rufus Dawes, shuddering at the dismal
omen, averting his face, plunged again into the forest.</p>
<p>For four days he wandered aimlessly through the bush. He had given up all
hopes of making the overland journey, and yet, as long as his scanty
supply of food held out, he strove to keep away from the settlement.
Unable to resist the pangs of hunger, he had increased his daily ration;
and though the salted meat, exposed to rain and heat, had begun to turn
putrid, he never looked at it but he was seized with a desire to eat his
fill. The coarse lumps of carrion and the hard rye-loaves were to him
delicious morsels fit for the table of an emperor. Once or twice he was
constrained to pluck and eat the tops of tea-trees and peppermint shrubs.
These had an aromatic taste, and sufficed to stay the cravings of hunger
for a while, but they induced a raging thirst, which he slaked at the icy
mountain springs. Had it not been for the frequency of these streams, he
must have died in a few days. At last, on the twelfth day from his
departure from the Coal Head, he found himself at the foot of Mount
Direction, at the head of the peninsula which makes the western side of
the harbour. His terrible wandering had but led him to make a complete
circuit of the settlement, and the next night brought him round the shores
of Birches Inlet to the landing-place opposite to Sarah Island. His stock
of provisions had been exhausted for two days, and he was savage with
hunger. He no longer thought of suicide. His dominant idea was now to get
food. He would do as many others had done before him—give himself up
to be flogged and fed. When he reached the landing-place, however, the
guard-house was empty. He looked across at the island prison, and saw no
sign of life. The settlement was deserted! The shock of this discovery
almost deprived him of reason. For days, that had seemed centuries, he had
kept life in his jaded and lacerated body solely by the strength of his
fierce determination to reach the settlement; and now that he had reached
it, after a journey of unparalleled horror, he found it deserted. He
struck himself to see if he was not dreaming. He refused to believe his
eyesight. He shouted, screamed, and waved his tattered garments in the
air. Exhausted by these paroxysms, he said to himself, quite calmly, that
the sun beating on his unprotected head had dazed his brain, and that in a
few minutes he should see well-remembered boats pulling towards him. Then,
when no boat came, he argued that he was mistaken in the place; the island
yonder was not Sarah Island, but some other island like it, and that in a
second or so he would be able to detect the difference. But the inexorable
mountains, so hideously familiar for six weary years, made mute reply, and
the sea, crawling at his feet, seemed to grin at him with a thin-lipped,
hungry mouth. Yet the fact of the desertion seemed so inexplicable that he
could not realize it. He felt as might have felt that wanderer in the
enchanted mountains, who, returning in the morning to look for his
companions, found them turned to stone.</p>
<p>At last the dreadful truth forced itself upon him; he retired a few paces,
and then, with a horrible cry of furious despair, stumbled forward towards
the edge of the little reef that fringed the shore. Just as he was about
to fling himself for the second time into the dark water, his eyes,
sweeping in a last long look around the bay, caught sight of a strange
appearance on the left horn of the sea beach. A thin, blue streak,
uprising from behind the western arm of the little inlet, hung in the
still air. It was the smoke of a fire!</p>
<p>The dying wretch felt inspired with new hope. God had sent him a direct
sign from Heaven. The tiny column of bluish vapour seemed to him as
glorious as the Pillar of Fire that led the Israelites. There were yet
human beings near him!—and turning his face from the hungry sea, he
tottered with the last effort of his failing strength towards the blessed
token of their presence.</p>
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