The Lost Valley Part 26

His was the longer and more difficult route, and I had intended at first to take it myself, for reasons that have nothing at all to do with this tale; but he was so insistent, and at one stage threatened so much unpleasantness, that I gave into him, if only for the sake of peace.

Before we started I had another talk with Moira and endeavored to dissuade her from accompanying us, but she very calmly told me that she had additional reasons now for going with us. There was sure to be trouble, she admitted that much; but then wasn't her place by my side, more especially if things weren't all they should be? Her logic left much to be desired, but it had the one merit of achieving its object. It was devastating; it completely crushed all my arguments and left me without a leg to stand on.

The late March of the year 1919 saw the three of us at the rendezvous, which we had reached without incident of any sort. Contrary to our expectations the other party had not been sighted, and the outlook was certainly auspicious. For all that I felt worried. Everything was going along too swimmingly, and I had a queer feeling that we would meet with trouble very shortly, if only to even things up. Ease and success can only be won after much expenditure of blood and tears; there is not a thing in life worth trying for that can be bought with a minimum of effort. The greater the prize, the greater the price one must pay; always one pays, with health, with limbs, sometimes with life itself.

During the time Moira and I had been travelling together I had slept of a night with one eye more or less open, and the strain of being constantly on the alert was just beginning to tell on me. As a consequence I was very pleased when c.u.mshaw suggested that we should take watch and watch about. I agreed, with the reservation that I must always be on guard for the dawn-watch. I didn't explain why I was so anxious to take that particular watch, and, though I noticed Moira looking curiously at me, she made no remark. I knew from experience that men are at their sleepiest about four o'clock in the morning, and an attack can be successfully launched then that would fail at any other hour of the day or night. I had yet to test c.u.mshaw on active service, so I claimed the four o'clock stretch for my own. It doesn't hurt to be careful; I've never yet met anyone who was sorry he had taken precautions.

We camped within a hundred yards of the creek, and after supper c.u.mshaw and I sprawled on the gra.s.s and talked. Moira had retired to an improvised tent we had fas.h.i.+oned for her, and, as it was just out of earshot, we were free to speak our thoughts. I had not seen c.u.mshaw for the better part of two weeks--he had started from his own place and come right on from there without calling on me again--and I hoped that he might have some further news for me. I asked him casually how his father was getting on.

"Right enough," he said, blowing a cloud of smoke out of his mouth.

"Some days you wouldn't think there was a thing wrong with him. He'll talk pretty lucidly at times, but it isn't anything that can be of any use to us. He doesn't seem to have taken much notice of the position of the valley, he apparently thought at the time that it would be very simple to pick it up again, and I fancy that Bradby must have confirmed him in that view. He couldn't have taken into account the way they had twisted about in the mountains. It's the simplest thing in the world to lose yourself here, the more so if you're confident you know your way."

"You've about struck it there," I said. "I just want to give you a little piece of advice, and I hope you won't take it amiss. I don't want to talk about this expedition any more than I can help for two reasons.

One's this: I don't wish to cause Miss Drummond any more uneasiness than is absolutely necessary. You know as well as I do that there's a big chance of the lot of us being wiped out just about the time we get within sight of the end. I wouldn't be surprised if they let us walk into a trap and finished us at their leisure. As for the other reason--well, it's never safe to say that you're alone anywhere. If we raise our voices above whispers here we might be giving away valuable information. So just let us keep watch on our tongues. More hopes have been ruined and more chances of success spoilt by gabbling tongues than by any other dozen causes all rolled together."

"I can quite understand that," c.u.mshaw said, between puffs at his pipe.

It was one of those neat little affairs with a round bowl, a spick-and-span pipe that had burnt an even color and that shone as brightly as the day he bought it. My pipe was a sorrier article; it was battered and blackened, and one side of the bowl was down beneath the level of the other, showing that it had been lighted oftener with a blazing brand than with the orthodox matches. In a way it was like its owner; it had been tested by fire and had survived the test. If I were philosophical--but then I wasn't, and that's about all there is to it.

"I didn't go to Landsborough," c.u.mshaw said after a pause. "I missed my train at Ararat, and so I came on to Great Western. It's much the shorter way. I wish you had known of it before."

"I'm all the better pleased you came that way," I told him. "It will help to disorganise the chase."

He bent over, picked up a live coal in his bare fingers and applied it to his pipe before replying.

"I rather think," he said slowly, "that it will have just the opposite effect."

"You can't have any nerves in those fingertips of yours," I said. "Why will it?"

"I don't seem to have any, do I? I think I saw one of the men at Great Western."

"You don't know them," I said. "How could you?"

"Mr. Bryce described them in his letter," c.u.mshaw answered. "This man fitted the description of one of them, a dark sort of chap."

"Spanish type?" I queried.

c.u.mshaw nodded. "I wonder why it is," he ran on, "that we're always more suspicious of that sort of man than, say, a fair type?"

"Relic of the Armada, I suppose," I suggested. "Tell me all about the man you saw."

"I was coming along the roadside," c.u.mshaw began, "past one of the vineyards, when I noticed a man working close at hand. I was just going to pa.s.s by when it struck me that he was the only person about. I thought that rather queer and I gave him a second look. Then I saw that he wasn't digging, as I had thought at first, but that he was scratching aimlessly at the ground. One of those queer feelings that seem altogether unrelated to fact crept over me. Call it second sight or any other fancy name you please, the fact remains that I suddenly knew--not thought, mind you; I knew--that he did not want me to notice him and that he was pretending to be one of the workmen, just so that I would pa.s.s him by without more than a cursory glance. When I came to think it over afterwards, I remembered that it struck me when first I saw him that he was the only man I had seen in the vineyards for miles. Of course I had that idea in my mind when I looked at him the second time.

That doesn't explain how I understood that I was the very man he did not want to see. He had his head bent down naturally, his hat well drawn over his face, and he went on scratching and sc.r.a.ping as if his very life depended on the energy with which he worked. I didn't get more than a pa.s.sing glimpse of him, and that wasn't too good--you can't go over to a man and pull off his hat just because he looks suspicious--but I'd swear on a stack of Bibles that he's one of the men we'll have to deal with."

"Perhaps so," I said. "At any rate I'm not going to allow chance workers in the fields to rob me of my night's rest."

"No more am I," a.s.sented c.u.mshaw. "So you don't think there's any likelihood----."

"I don't think anything at all," I cut in. "I take proper precautions, that's all."

He made no comment on my unceremonious interruption, but the strange half-smile he gave me showed that he realised in part at least how his story had affected me. As a matter of fact I was more perturbed than I cared to admit. I had been thinking things over all day, and it had just occurred to me that, seeing we had heard nothing of them since Bryce's death, it was quite possible that they were even now following up the false clue that he had laid for them, and which one of them had got away with the night of the burglary. If that were so, why had they come back and killed Bryce? It was a curious enough situation, and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that I was right. Our immunity so far was due solely to the fact that the others were well occupied with the faked plan they had stolen on that memorable evening.

Now on top of that Albert c.u.mshaw must come with this circ.u.mstantial story of his and upset all my deductions. The strange part of it was, though my reason told me that he had been a victim of his own brilliant imagination, part of my mind--that part that believed in second sight and banshees and were-wolves, and stuff of that sort--told me that he was not so very much wrong after all.

"I'll get to sleep," he said, interrupting the train of my thoughts.

"I'll be fresh when my turn comes for guard."

"Tell me," I said, for the matter had been puzzling me all night, "where did you learn to light your pipe with red-hot coals?"

"Oh, that," he said with a laugh. "I saw you doing it earlier in the evening, and I made up my mind that what you did I could do."

"Then it must have burnt you."

"Horribly," he said with a grimace. "Good-night."

CHAPTER III.

THE PROMISED LAND.

"This," I remarked, "is the sort of country Adam Lindsay Gordon would have loved. No man but he could do justice to it."

"We've been out seven days," said c.u.mshaw, "we've travelled G.o.d 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. Gordon might have made an epic out of it, but I'm hanged if I'm poet enough to appreciate the country or philosopher enough to ignore the sheer physical discomforts of the journey."

"If you'd been through the things I've been through," I a.s.serted, "if you'd been in New Guinea when there was a gold-strike on and had to climb hundreds of feet up a straight cliff to get to the fields, hanging on all the time to creepers as thick as your wrist, you'd think this was just Paradise. If you'd been with me in the sweltering Solomon Island jungle, where every breath you took made the perspiration stand out on your forehead in big beads, or up in the Klond.y.k.e when it was fifty below and a man's own breath turned into ice about his mouth, you'd know what life really meant. Here you're in the Garden of Victoria; you see sights that knock some of the beauty spots of the world into a c.o.c.ked hat, and all you can do is growl at the country. You can't expect to go up and down the mountain side in a lift or anything of the sort."

"It's all very well for you to talk like that," he objected. "You're used to this kind of life; we're not. That makes all the difference."

"So it seems," I said. "But I haven't the slightest intention of giving in yet. As a matter of fact I rather think we've been a little too sure that we were on the right track. We haven't been as careful as we might.

We've gone along blindly."

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Just this. We've been so infernally confident that we only had to find a clump of wattle and a lone tree, and we were there. Now that lone tree must be somewhere on the east side of the valley, and, despite the fact that it's on high ground, it's so hidden that we wouldn't see it until we were almost on top of it. It might be perfectly visible from inside the valley, and at the same time be hidden from the outside by another hill. As for the wattle, has it ever struck you that wattle only begins to spring into bloom about the end of August? It's almost April now, and you wouldn't find anything but just a ma.s.s of green bushes."

"If there was a valley, which same I'm beginning to doubt," c.u.mshaw said doggedly, "we'd have found it before this."

"I don't know what Miss Drummond is cooking for our tea," I remarked irrelevantly, "but it smells good."

"If you think you can put me off that way," c.u.mshaw said, "you're mighty mistaken. I'm tired of it all, and for two pins----"

"You know very well," I cut in, "that I haven't one pin, let alone two."

"You apparently don't understand that I'm perfectly serious."

"Yes, I do. I'm serious too. I'm quite satisfied that we haven't been going about things in the right way. We've made mistakes, and it's up to us to find out what those mistakes are and go over the ground again."

"I'll give it another week," said c.u.mshaw, "and if we haven't found anything by then we might as well retire, for you can bet your sweet life we never will."