"Yes, my boy," I murmured, "I'll fish you up if you're there, or a
fistful of gravel for Jim and Frenchy--little devil! It'll be change
for his fiver;" and I chuckled at my joke.
I drew a long breath and dropped quietly into the water, head first;
down, down, down--gently, softly. A couple of easy strokes and I glided
along the bottom. Then something touched me. God in heaven! how it all
burst on me at once! I felt four rigid fingers laid on my shoulder and
drawn down my chest, the finger-nails scratching me. Instantly I made a
grasp with both hands; my left fastened on the neck of a human body, and
my right, just above, closed, and the _fingers met_ through the ragged
flesh of a gashed throat.
I tried to scream--the water choked me. I let go and swam on, and then
up. I shot out of the water waist high, gasping and glaring wildly, and
then soused under again. As I again came up I dashed the water from my
eyes. I saw the surface of the pool break, and a head rose slowly.
Kind Heaven! _there were two_! Slowly the two bodies rose across the
black margin where the shadow ceased, full in the moonlit portion of the
pool--cold, clear and horrible in their ghastly nakedness. And as they
rose the murderous wounds appeared. The dank hair hung over their
foreheads; the glazed and sightless eyeballs were fixed with the vacant
stare of death on _me_. One bore a terrible gash from temple to eye,
and lower down the bluish red slit of an assegai on the left breast.
On the other was one wound only; but how awful! The throat was cut from
ear to ear; the bluish lips of the great gash hung wide apart where my
hand had torn them. I could even see the severed windpipe. The head
was thrown slightly back, but the eyes glared down at me with an awful
stony glare, while through the parted lips the teeth gleamed and grinned
cold and bright as they caught the light of the moon. One glance--half
an instant--showed me all this, and then, as the figures rose waist
high, I saw one arm rigid at right angles to the body from the elbow,
and the stiff hand that had clawed me. For one instant they poised,
balancing; then, bowing slowly over, they came down on the top of me.
Then indeed my brain seemed to go. I struggled under them. I fought
and shrieked; but I suppose the bubbles came up in silence. The dead
stiff hand was laid on my head and pressed me down--down, down! Then
the hand of death slipped, and I was free. Once I kicked them as I
struggled to the surface, and gasping, frantic, mad, made for the bank.
On, on, on! O God! would I never reach it? One more effort, a wrench,
and I was out. Never a pause now. One bound, and I had passed the
ledge; then up and up, past the cliffs, over the rocks, cut and
bleeding, on I dashed as fast as mortal man ever raced. Up, up the
stony path, till, with torn feet and shaking in every limb, I reached
the waggon. There was an exclamation, a pause, and then a perfect yell
of laughter. The laugh saved me; the heartless cruelty of it did what
nothing else could have done--it roused my temper; but for that, I
believe I should have gone mad.
Harding alone came forward anxiously towards me.
"What's the matter?" he asked. "For God's sake, what is it?"
The laugh had sobered me, and I answered quietly that it was nothing
much--just a thing I would like him to see down at the pool. There were
a score of questions in anxious and half-apologetic tones, for they soon
realised that some thing was wrong; but I answered nothing, and so they
followed me in silence, and there, on the oily, unbroken surface of the
silent pool, floated in grim relief the two bodies. We pulled them out
and found the corpses lashed together. At the end of the rope was an
empty loop, the stone out of which I must in my struggle have dislodged.
Close to the nigger we laid them, with another pile of stones to mark
the spot; but who they were and where they came from none of us ever
knew for certain.
The week before this two lucky diggers had passed through Newcastle from
the fields, going home. Four years have now passed, letters have come,
friends have inquired, but there is no news of them, and I think, poor
chaps! they must have "gone home" by another route.