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On the other side, the signals would run thus the settlement to Signal Hill, Signal Hill to Woody Island, Woody Island to Eaglehawk. Did a prisoner escape from the Coal Mines, the guard at Eaglehawk Neck could be aroused, and the whole island informed of the "bolt" in less than twenty minutes. With these advantages of nature and art, the prison was held to be the most secure in the world.
This place was called the Devil's Blow-hole. The upper drop of the earring was named Forrestier's Peninsula, and was joined to the mainland by another isthmus called East Bay Neck. Forrestier's Peninsula was an almost impenetrable thicket, growing to the brink of a perpendicular cliff of basalt. Eaglehawk Neck was the door to the prison, and it was kept bolted.
He had barely time to lift the seaweed curtain that veiled the entrance to the chasm, when the Eaglehawk boat rounded the promontory. Burgess was in the stern-sheets, and seemed to be making signals to someone on the top of the cliff. Rex, grinning behind his veil, divined the manoeuvre. McNab and his party were to search above, while the Commandant examined the gulf below.
Burgess, confident from the reply of the Signal Hill semaphore, that the alarm had been given at Eaglehawk Isthmus, promised himself the re-capture of the gang before many hours; and, giving orders to keep the communications going, retired to dinner. His convict servants had barely removed the soup when the result of John Rex's ingenuity became manifest.
Eaglehawk Neck was the link that connected the two drops of the earring. It was a strip of sand four hundred and fifty yards across. On its eastern side the blue waters of Pirates' Bay, that is to say, of the Southern Ocean, poured their unchecked force.
Nevermore and The Sphinx of Eaglehawk give other views of the gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life revealed in The Miner's Right.
A solitary eaglehawk sat on the top branch of a dead gum-tree, watching him with evil eyes; a chorus of laughing jackasses cackled after him in derision from a grove of young timber; a magpie, the joy of the morning, and most mirthful of birds, whistled for him sweet notes of hope and good cheer; then a number of carrion crows beheld him, and approached with their long-drawn, ill-omened "croank, croank," the most dismal note ever uttered by any living thing.
It was swelled by the roars, and cooeys, and curses of every man above ground and below, in the shafts and drives on the flats, and in the tunnels of the White Hills, from Golden Gully and Sheep's Head, to Job's Gully and Eaglehawk, until the warning that "Joey's out" had reached to the utmost bounds of the goldfield.
"I won't be far behind 'em," said the Commandant, "at any rate." Between Eaglehawk and Signal Hill were, for the absconders, other dangers. Along the indented coast of Port Bunche were four constables' stations. These stations mere huts within signalling distance of each other fringed the shore, and to avoid them it would be necessary to make a circuit into the scrub.
A consultation was held at night, and it was agreed to kill Watch in the morning if nothing else turned up, Crow by this time being too hungry to say another word in favour of his dog. But at daylight an eaglehawk was watching them from a tree, and Brown shot it. It was soon put in the ashes, and when cooked was divided among the seven. On the eighth day Macnamara said, "I can smell the ocean."