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"We're not the first here," Cumshaw said suddenly. Bradby turned on him in alarm. "What d'y' mean?" he asked indistinctly. "Some of the trees are blazed," Cumshaw pointed out. "The cuts are clean, and that means they've been done with an axe. But they're all weather-worn, so it must have been some time ago." "I don't like the look of it all the same," Bradby said despondently.
He compressed himself into the smallest possible space behind the tree and then fired in the direction of the last shot. He allowed a short interval to elapse and then fired again. The other man must have seen the flashes, but he made no attempt to answer them. The moment the first shot was fired Cumshaw realised, in a flash of intuition, that his assailant was none other than Jack Bradby.
It was broad daylight when they awoke, and the sun was already high up in the heavens. "Somewhere about nine or ten o'clock," Cumshaw guessed. "We've slept in, Jack." Bradby ruefully admitted that this was so, but excused it on the ground that they would be better fitted for the day's work.
During the morning Bradby's horse developed lameness, and, though the two men slackened the pace in order to give it every chance, by mid-day it could barely limp along. "This won't do," said Bradby in despair. "We're losing time we can ill afford. All the same this old crock'll have to struggle on until nightfall, and then we'll see whether we'll have to shoot it."
But his relief was short-lived, for in the last half-second his guard had relaxed. Bryce said: "Why did Bradby want to kill you, Mr. Cumshaw?" The quick yet calm question, covering as it did the one episode of which nobody but the two participants could possibly have any knowledge, startled Cumshaw. For once his impassive face showed signs of fear, and his eyes became those of a hunted man.
Both of them were children of the warm, sun-kissed lowlands, and the difference of even a few degrees of temperature had a remarkable effect on them. With Abel Cumshaw it was such as to send a warm glow into his cheeks; the cold bite of the air made his blood sparkle like new wine and urged him on to fresh efforts. It affected Mr. Bradby in another and a worse way.
True, on this particular evening he had exercised a kind of maudlin caution, but the tactics of Mr. Jack Bradby were of the sort to extract valuable information in the least noticeable way possible, and as a consequence the man, while keeping a strict guard of his tongue, at the same time let fall enough information to satisfy the curiosity of the 'ranger.
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.
Then with the swiftness of thought he leaped to one side, pulling his revolver loose at the same instant. He had just the smallest fraction of a second's start of the police, and in the flurry of the moment he actually burst through the cordon that had formed around him. The next instant the carbines of the police commenced to bark. Bradby stumbled, recovered himself, and fired over his shoulder.
Cumshaw had no intention of moving until he was fully satisfied in his own mind that the little black dots were really kangaroos. Something seemed to whisper that they weren't. "They're not kangaroos," he said with conviction. He had caught the glint of sunlight on metal, a brass button of a man's uniform, or perhaps the polished barrel of a carbine. "Oh," said Mr. Bradby, "so you've tumbled."
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