"Mr. Burke's return being so soon after my departure caused the tracks of his camels to correspond in the character of age exactly with our own tracks. The remains of three separate fires led us to suppose that blacks had been camped there. The fires had burned to mere ashes, and left no perceptible evidence from the position of the sticks as to whether they were black men's fires or not. The ground above the caché was so perfectly restored to the appearance it presented when I left it, that in the absence of any fresh sign or mark of any description to be seen near, it was impossible to suppose that it had been disturbed." Wright and Brahe rode away again, and when Wills afterwards visited the depôt to bury the journals, he says that he could not perceive any sign of it having been visited; a series of singular and fatal oversights that almost seem to have been pre-ordained. On the 18th of June, Wright reached the Darling and sent in his dispatches. As may be imagined they occasioned great consternation, and no time was lost in instituting search parties to scour half the continent for the missing men. Fortunately a light party, under Mr. A. W. Howitt, had already been equipped, to follow on Burke's tracks, for the long absence and silence of Wright had already caused people to feel anxious. Howitt's party was doubled and he made all speed to Cooper's Creek. Meantime the other colonies took the matter up and three more parties were in the field. Howitt, whose fortunes we must follow, started early in July; the VICTORIA, steam sloop, was sent up to the mouth of the Albert River, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, from Brisbane, having Mr. W. Landsborough on board. Another Queensland expedition, under Mr. Walker, left the furthest out station, in the Rockhampton district, to proceed overland to the Gulf, and from South Australia, started M'Kinlay. On the 8th of September Howitt, having with him Brahe, reached Cooper's Creek, and on the 13th arrived at the fatal depôt, but like all the others, he says that he could not see any sign of the caché having been touched; nor did he stop to examine it. On the 15th, while trying to follow Burke's outward track down the creek, Howitt says:--