The search went on to its conclusion. It was prolonged and completely thorough. And when the movements of the Aurora men ceased and their ghostly figures no longer haunted the valley, the moon had passed from her throne in the heavens and the star-light was already beginning to fade out. Then came darkness, utter and complete. It was the darkness preceding dawn. And the valley of the Lias River was given up wholly to the haunting sounds of the night.
Cy Liskard was ashore at a landing on the river he had made his own. His stout canoe was lying moored to the overhanging trunk of a tree, and it swung away at the end of its rawhide to the easy stream. A roll of blankets lay in the bottom of it while his camp outfit was littered upon the gravelly foreshore about his feet. It was noon or thereabouts, and the day was overcast and threatening. But down here on the river was the pleasant warmth of a summer day.
He was gazing out downstream, and his view was of a great expanse of flowing water moving heavily on towards the sea. There were many miles between him and the coast yet. The journey would run into something approaching one hundred and more, which it would take days to travel. But it was not the distance he had yet to go that preoccupied him. It was not the scene set out before him with its amazing hills and dense forests growing down to the water’s edge. He was literally and perhaps spiritually at the parting of the ways.
Directly ahead of him a hill reared its lofty crest. It stood up an indestructible barrier to the rushing waters hurtling on towards the distant ocean. It had faced the fierce onslaught of the stream throughout the ages. It had yielded nothing but the loose soil about its rocky base. And so the waters which refused denial to their progress had turned sharply away in face of its heroic resistance.
Somewhere to the north of that hill he knew that another river flowed over an almost parallel course. It was a smaller river which owed its source to the same world of hills as that which bred the flood of the Lias. But it was not for its proximity he was concerned. It was not for its relation to his own. It was because, somewhere further down its course, Ivor McLagan’s oil camp was pitched. And Ivor McLagan was the man who had hurt and thwarted him.