“Me leave no track into bush this way,” the black cries from his perch, his dark face covered with a big, oily, triumphant smile, and Claude, turning his head as he rides on, sees Billy swinging from tree to tree, like some great anthropomorphic ape, into the heart of the dark forest on his right.
Angland has heard of the feather slippers used by the natives of some parts of Australia when particularly anxious to abstain from leaving any dangerous trail behind them during their peregrinations, but Billy’s are the first he has seen. And on catching up to Williams, and telling him of the method in which the black youth has taken his departure, the old miner spins Claude so many interesting yarns about the ingenious devices employed by the aborigines to avoid being hunted down by their native or foreign foes, that he determines to get up an exhibition of some of them when his pilot returns with the two new auxiliaries.
But, leaving little Joe to lead the rest of the party on to the next water-hole, let us follow the dark-skinned Billy on his way to the village. This young man has learned a good deal about the kind of country he is now traversing during the last few weeks, and, moreover, he has journeyed to his friends’ hamlet more than once before from about the same point where he has just entered the forest. So he wends his way in a fairly straight course, and is not more than three hours doing the seven miles of rough travelling that has to be got over before he reaches the vicinity of the _Myall_ camp. After leaving the forest at the foot of the wild range, his way lies for the greater part up the dried-up bed of a mountain torrent, that has cut its way during countless ages through the enormous mass of grey granite of which the mountain is composed. High above the dark boulder-strewn path of the storm-stream, the grim old cliffs rise on either hand, their broken fronts decked here and there with clinging tufts of herbage, and crowned with overflowing wealth of perennial vegetation of the dark forest on their summits. Here and there the out-crop of a quartz reef stretches across the path with great, teeth-like projections of white, flinty rock, and now and again the brown face of what is a waterfall after the rains necessitates a bit of climbing. At last the traveller reaches the crown of the watershed, and follows the rocky ridge of the range northwards for a couple of miles. The forest, that has hitherto consisted chiefly of various kinds of _eucalypti_, some of which give off an almost overpowering odour much resembling peppermint, now changes its character suddenly, for here is the edge of the basaltic “top-dressing” that covers the bigger lines of ranges, lying to the eastward, with its characteristic vegetation.