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Cumshaw, place your cards on the table. You are after the gold that Bradby hid; so am I. Our aims are the same. Let us be partners, instead of employer and assistant. What do you know that I do not? What do I know that you do not?"
The hills look low enough." So they turned off at right angles to their path and presently were edging their way through the wood again. As Bradby had surmised, the ground rose steadily, though it was very rough. Big boulders lay about the ground amongst the trees, which were thinning off.
A rusted gun lay in line with the thing's left thigh, and Bradby, following the muzzle with a trained eye, saw that it was pointed at the man's head. "Suicide," said Cumshaw. "Look at his head. He's blown out what little brains he had." He was right.
"Great place, this," Cumshaw said presently. "Great place," Mr. Bradby assented. "A man can die here without anyone being any the wiser." Mr. Cumshaw made no reply to that, but the corners of his mouth tightened as if he suspected some hidden meaning beneath that smooth remark. Just as the first rays of the rising sun slanted into the hut Mr.
Bradby absently ignored the challenge in Cumshaw's reply and kept silence for the rest of the time. After breakfast the two of them took the saddle-bags down to the hole, placed them inside, and then stamped the earth tightly down on top of them. "Now that's done," said Bradby, with an air of relief, "the sooner we get out of here the better." "How about old bones over there?"
If we only keep up this spurt of ours we'll make a gully or a valley where we can hide for months without a soul being a whit the wiser." "I hope so," said Cumshaw, in the manner of a man who has very grave doubts. "Hold your breath for your work," Mr. Bradby advised. "You might need it all yet."
They had lost all sight of the pursuers, though once Bradby caught a glimpse of smoke far away to the east, smoke that he fancied came from the mid-day fire of the troopers. They halted at sunset in the shadow of a clump of red gums and made the first meal since morning. As a result of a hurried consultation they decided to press on until midnight.
True, his reasoning faculties, which were none of the densest, carried him a little further, but he would have been the very first to admit his fallibility. Nothing had occurred as yet to connect Cumshaw with Mr. Jack Bradby. He recognised that the man had a definite object in view in going to the Grampians that was plain enough but it might after all be merely coincidence.
The humor of this was apparently lost on the captured ones, for they received it in silence, much to Mr. Bradby's disgust. "Laugh when I crack a joke!" he roared. "Laugh, all of you, damn you!" Somebody giggled in a half-hearted manner. "That's no sort of a laugh," snorted Mr. Bradby. "When I say laugh, I mean laugh. I don't want you to bubble like that jackass did."
Jack Bradby, as the reader will readily understand, passed into the police records and thus became matters of history. Though no definite statement has been left us, Mr. Bryce must have first come across the story during his researches into Victorian history.
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