What was he to say? What could he say? Not that he had so little, but so much. And it might never be read after all, or at best it would only be read by some station hand who, once they were dead, would give but a passing thought to their message, only a passing thought to their sufferings. They had found a skeleton, he remembered, the first year he had been on Yerlo, a skeleton that must have been lying there years, a poor wind-tossed, sunbaked thing from which all semblance of humanity had long since departed, and he, in his carelessness, had thought so little of it, had never realized the awful suffering that must have been before the strong man came to _that_.
And now--and now--he took his stick and wrote in large printed letters on the crisp salt--
“James Anderson and Charles Helm were lost on the 20th October. They have gone S.E. from the salt-pan. Will you kindly send word to Mrs. Helm, The Esplanade, St. Kilda, and to Miss Drysdale, Gipps Street, East Melbourne.”
It seemed so feeble, so inadequate, not a hundreth part of what he felt did it express, and yet what could he say? Not even in his extremity could he write tender messages to his loved ones there. They would know, surely they would know, they would understand, that his thoughts had been full of them when he wrote that cold message. What more could he say? But would they ever know the love and longing that had filled his heart? Would his mother ever know that her boy had thought of her at the last? Would Mabel Drysdale understand how he had cared for her?--all he had meant to convey by the mere mention of her name? He stepped slowly back and wakened his companion.
“Mate,” he said, “don’t you think we’d better be travelling? It’s a little cooler now, and it ‘s getting late.”
Anderson struggled to his feet wearily and then went down to the salt-pan.
“So you ‘ve been leaving a last message,” he said; “I ‘m afraid it’s not much good. Who ‘s likely to pass this way?”
“It’s only a chance, of course,” said Helm, “but--well--I ‘d like them, if possible, to know I ‘d thought of them.”
“And a woman, too,” laughed Anderson cynically, “if we get out of this you ‘ll learn, I expect, just about how little value she sets on your care for her.”