"Yes," said Deedes, leaning back against a bulkhead, with his arms still folded. "It's a pilot's cutter--the first thing handy, I suppose--with the police and your father aboard her. One word before he comes. Once you'd have come fast enough to my arms. Enid--I'm done for--come to them now!" He unfolded and flung them wide as he spoke; a great look lit his face, half mocking, half sublime, and down my duck jacket, where his arms had been, a dark stream trickled to the deck. Before I could get to him he fell in a white heap under our eyes. * * * * * Deedes was dead. Watson was dying. Two constables in the cutter were badly hit; and with their ghastly burden the little ships tacked home in consort to Port Philip Heads. It was midnight when we saw the lights. The bank-manager and I stood together on the cutter's deck, he with a brace of heavy bags between his heels. His daughter was down below, but the thought of her troubled him still. As he said, the money was the bank's, and it was safe; but his daughter was his own, and this scandal would attach forever to her name. I denied it hotly, but the old man would have it so. "Don't tell me," he grumbled. "I know the world, and Enid will go ashore with something unpleasantly like a slur upon her name." "Then it won't be for long," I at last retorted. "We meant it to keep until we got there; but with your permission, sir, your daughter and I shall go ashore engaged." THE VOICE OF GUNBAR "H'sh! Did you hear a coo-ee?" I shook my head in some surprise. My host seemed a good fellow; but hitherto he had proved an extremely poor companion, and for five minutes, I suppose, neither of us had said a word. My eyes had fallen from the new well, with its pump and white palings shining like ivory under the full moon, to our two shadows skewered through and through by those of the iron hurdles against which we were leaning. These hurdles enclosed and protected a Moreton Bay fig, which had been planted where the lid of the old well used to lie, so I had just been told; and I had said I wondered why one well should have been filled in and another sunk so very near the same place, and getting no answer I had gone on wondering for those five minutes. So if there had been any sound beyond the croaking of the crickets (which you get to notice about as much as the tick of a clock), I felt certain that I must have heard it too. I, however, was a very new chum, whereas Warburton of Gunbar was a ten-year bushman, whose ear might well be quicker than mine to catch the noises of the wilderness; and when I raised my eyes inquisitively there was a light in his that made me uneasy. "Hear it now?" he said quietly, and with a smile, as a seaman points out sails invisible to the land-lubber. "I do--plainly." "I don't," I candidly replied. "But if it's some poor devil lost in the mallee, you'll be turning out to look for him, and I'll lend you a hand."