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Five minutes later I had gained the further wall of the valley, and found that, with the help of the bushes, it was the easiest thing imaginable for an active man like myself to haul himself up over the ridge and drop on the track which Abel Cumshaw and the late Mr. Bradby had trodden so many years before.
It seems as if the sub-conscious memory of the one act had its influence on the man in his performance of the other. Thereafter Mr. Cumshaw simply disappeared off the face of the earth. His son's story is that he went to New South Wales, married there and raised a family, and in the light of subsequent events that seems to be what most likely occurred.
"What do you think of the place?" Cumshaw asked casually. But he did not look up at his mate; he kept his eyes studiously on the ground. "Just the sort of place we could make our headquarters," said Bradby, with an enthusiasm that even the forced restraint of his tone could not hide. "I don't think we'll have much need of headquarters once this is over and done with," Cumshaw hinted.
The bleached bones in front of him, too, became a means to an end, and, with the smile of a man who sees the way suddenly made clear, he too entered the hut in his turn. Cumshaw was busily engaged in laying a fire in the centre of the hut, taking care, however, that its glow would not show through the open doorway.
All the same, I'm willing to bet that the place's deserted." "Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," suggested Bradby. "However, you go off as you say and I'll wait here for you." Abel Cumshaw threw the reins to his companion, slid his revolver holsters round to the front within easy reach, should he need the weapons they contained, and slipped through the trees with the silence of a marauding tom-cat.
"We've been out seven days," said Cumshaw, "we've travelled God knows how many miles, we've climbed up a Hades of a lot of mountains, and I don't think there's a blind creek for twenty miles that we haven't followed to the end and back again, and at the end of it all we're no nearer the Valley than we were when we started.
The fact remained that I was a little hurt by what I saw, and I had to recognise, even though I ran counter to the promptings of my common-sense, that I wasn't as indifferent to her as I would have myself believe. I brought myself back with a jerk to the matter in hand. "What do you propose doing about the matter?" I asked of Cumshaw. He did not reply immediately.
He bent down quickly and picked up the loam-encrusted object that Cumshaw had dropped in the first moment of the encounter, Cumshaw followed his movements with troubled eyes, but did not interfere in any way. Bryce could see that the thing was a bit of wood, and on one piece of it, where the earth had been scraped off, there were letters scratched.
"It's no use," he said. "We can't take the horses out here. We'll just have to leave them. A man can crawl up through a sort of funnel in the wall of the rock, but you'd want a sling to get the horses along." "Can't we go back and try the way we came in?" Cumshaw shook his head decisively. "No," he said. "It won't do to risk it.
Of course it was a silly thing to do there might have been snakes and all manner of noxious crawling things there but I didn't think of that at the time. I was too intent on solving the riddle. My hand touched something.... I straightened up and faced the others. "Moira and Cumshaw," I said. "I've found the hut. That's a piece of it there."
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