"You don"t even know that," the other answered, his lips curling in a wry smile.
"I"ll know as soon as you tell me," Bryce hinted.
It is a difficult matter for a man, who all his life has held a close secret, to divulge it at a moment"s notice, in a sudden fit of warm friendliness, to a comparative stranger, and so Abel c.u.mshaw found it.
It is even harder to surrender one"s hopes and ambitions in favor of a potential rival, honest and all as that rival may appear to be. For one brief moment c.u.mshaw paused on the brink of revelation, the while he weighed the matter in his mind. In some strange way Bryce had guessed that he was after the gold, but did he know why and how? c.u.mshaw rather fancied he didn"t. He was so sure of it that he decided that he would gain nothing by divulging the connection between himself and the late Mr. Bradby. So the mouth which was opening to speak shut up again like a steel trap, and the dark eyes turned bleak and cold. He looked Bryce steadily and calmly in the face.
"There is nothing to tell," he said, and turned on his heel.
Black night had descended on the forest many hours before, so many in fact that the camp fire had sunk to a feeble red glow, and the dying embers were already circled by a ring of dead white ash. The breeze was crooning softly through the branches of the trees, singing weird chanties to itself. In between the murmurs of the wind there came another sound, the indistinct sound of a sleepy man mumbling to himself.
Bryce half-raised himself on one elbow and listened. Half a dozen feet away from him c.u.mshaw lay tightly rolled in his blankets. He tossed restlessly and once all but sat up. Bryce dropped quickly but soundlessly back into a p.r.o.ne position. But the alarm had been a false one, and presently he quietly raised himself again. The indistinct mumbling went on as before, and he strained his ears to catch some intelligible word.
"Kill me, would you?" he heard the other say.
His voice sank again, and for a time he mumbled and mouthed his words so that Bryce missed most of what he said. He was just on the point of settling down again when c.u.mshaw suddenly sat up.
"I"ll beat you yet, Bradby!" he cried with startling distinctness.
"You"re dead now and the gold"s mine."
His eyes opened and he stared dazedly around him. Bryce was lying p.r.o.ne and snoring away hoggishly. He was fast asleep; there was not the slightest doubt in the mind of the man who watched him so closely.
"I must have dreamt I said it," c.u.mshaw murmured to himself. "If I"d spoken the way I thought I had he"d have been wide-awake." And then he in his turn composed himself to slumber.
They were very quiet at breakfast. Bryce was turning the situation over in his mind, viewing it from all possible angles and seeking some method of getting c.u.mshaw to speak without in any way antagonising him. c.u.mshaw himself was troubled by lingering doubts. It was quite possible after all that Bryce had heard him, supposing he had spoken aloud, and was quietly dissembling for some purpose of his own. His very thoughtfulness seemed to lend color to that idea. He looked at Bryce across the carpet of gra.s.s and at the same instant Bryce raised his eyes. They stared at each other with the breathless intensity of two men who know that in all things they are evenly matched. Each was striving to the last atom of his will-power to break down the resistance of the other and force him in some way to take the initiative. At last it was Bryce who dropped his eyes a fraction and c.u.mshaw who breathed a sigh of relief. 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. c.u.mshaw?"
The quick yet calm question, covering as it did the one episode of which n.o.body but the two partic.i.p.ants could possibly have any knowledge, startled c.u.mshaw. For once his impa.s.sive face showed signs of fear, and his eyes became those of a hunted man. He half-rose to his feet and then dropped back again, as if aware of the uselessness of flight. He tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. In one short sentence Bryce had shattered all his hopes and pulled his airy castles to the ground.
Did this man but like to speak he would be once again c.u.mshaw the bushranger, the man who had been hand in glove with Bradby, and who, through some miracle of mischance, had not been bracketed with his dead colleague. Bryce knew all apparently, and a word from him----. c.u.mshaw shivered.
"You can trust me," Bryce said softly. "I guess I know your secret now.
You and Bradby carried out that robbery between you. You hid the gold, and for one reason and another you"ve never retrieved it. Isn"t that it?"
c.u.mshaw nodded. It was too late now to deny anything, even if he had so felt inclined. Nemesis in the shape of this laughing-eyed, gross-bodied man, had come upon him in his old age, and there was nothing for it but to take what was coming with as good a grace as he could muster.
"What happened thirty years or more ago is over and done with," Bryce ran on, "and I"m not the sort to bring it into the light of day again.
I"m after that gold, and, in order to get it, I"m quite ready to repeat my previous offer. We each seem to have something that the other lacks.
You can tell me many things I don"t know. Of that I"m sure."
"There"s a lot of things you seem sure of," c.u.mshaw said with a half-defiant air.
"I"m as sure that you"re the man who was with Bradby as if I"d seen it all myself," Bryce stated. "Remember, before you refuse, that it"s always better to compromise than fight. Furthermore, if you have to fight, it"s much better to have an ally you can rely on."
"What"s that?" c.u.mshaw demanded with a show of interest. "What do you mean?"
"Only this," Bryce said slowly. "There"s another crowd on the track, and they"ve already warned me that they"ll make the going heavy. If you"ve got to be up against them, why not throw in your lot with me? It"s fifty-fifty with us; if you stand out on your own, you"ll probably lose it all."
"I think you"ve got me in a cleft stick," c.u.mshaw said a trifle ruefully. "I can"t see that I can refuse. Now how much do you know?"
Said Mr. Bryce untruthfully, "I know everything except where you"ve hidden the gold."
"And even I couldn"t swear to that," c.u.mshaw said.
"It seems to me," said Bryce dryly, "that the best thing you can do is to tell me the whole story."
He listened eagerly to the tale, occasionally stopping the other to question him on some obscure point, sometimes helping him along with a comment that threw unexpected light in the dark corners of the story.
"It amounts to this," he said when c.u.mshaw had finished. "Bradby buried the gold in this hidden valley of yours. It"s so hidden--the valley, I mean--that you only came on it by accident, and you have no definite idea as to its whereabouts. It"s three or four days" journey into the mountains, that"s all you can say. There"s no way of recognising it from the outside that you know of. Well, I"ll tell you this, Mr. c.u.mshaw.
It"s my frank opinion that your clever murderous friend had some way of finding it again, or he wouldn"t have been in such haste to make away with you. He knew what he was doing, you can depend on it. Now I wonder if he left any clue?"
"I"ve got a hazy memory that he left directions somewhere and that I had them," c.u.mshaw said despondently, "but I can"t say what happened to them. You must remember that I was wandering about half-delirious for a long while after I got knocked, and it was years before I got really right again. I might have lost any note he made; I might have done anything with it."
"You might have and that"s a fact," Mr. Bryce agreed. "Now you say you"ve hunted for this valley many times during the last ten years or so."
c.u.mshaw nodded. "It seems funny," he said, "but I"ve never been able to find it."
"There"s nothing funny about it," Bryce told him. "History and fiction abound with instances of similar miscalculations. I"ll guarantee that there are scores of such places in every continent in the world.
Australia"s got just as many as any other place. What made you want to hunt it up again after all those years?"
"Old a.s.sociations, I suppose," c.u.mshaw said half-ashamedly. "While I was in New South Wales--I went there, you understand, until things blew over a bit--and my wife was alive, I didn"t want anything else but to be near her. When she died and things began to go wrong with me, I drifted back here. Money was short. I was living as best I could, and there were the children to look after, and the sight of the old places brought things back to my mind. I was beginning to dig bits up from the memory of the past--the doctors have some fancy name for lapses like mine, though I could never remember what it was--and then one day I asked myself why shouldn"t I go after the gold? It was as much mine as anyone else"s, now that Bradby was dead, and the Bank that originally owned it had gone smash about the Land Boom time from what I could gather. I went, but I missed the place somehow. I went time and again, but it was always like that "Lost Mountain" story of Mayne Reid"s, though a valley"s harder to find than a mountain you"d think. I couldn"t find it anyhow, and that"s about all there is to it."
"Um!" said Mr. Bryce, and he ran his hand softly across his chin. "We are up against a bigger thing than I thought. I"m hanged if I can see a glimmer of light anywhere. Is there anything you can suggest?"
c.u.mshaw did not reply. He was staring straight ahead of him, staring intently, and little furrows of anxiety marred the serenity of his forehead. He was peering into the shadows of the trees as if his eyes were twin searchlights that could cut substance from the gloom. He was staring so intently that Bryce whirled round, fully convinced that his friends of the telephone were upon them.
"What"s wrong?" he queried in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing," said c.u.mshaw. "I thought I heard something moving, that"s all."
Bryce in his turn peered intently in between the tree-boles, but the shadows lay thick upon the gra.s.s between, and it was difficult to define even the shapes of the more distant timber. The place was still and gloomy, full of grim forebodings, like a summer sky in which a storm is gathering.
"We must have been mistaken," Bryce remarked in his embracing way.
"There doesn"t seem to be anyone about."
"Hands up!" snapped a crisp voice, and in the surprise of the moment Bryce obeyed. c.u.mshaw had no such intention. He dropped suddenly on to the ground even as a shot rang out, and a bullet whistled close above his head. The next instant he was crashing swiftly through the bushes, spinning down into the gully like a human projectile.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GATHERING OF THE EAGLES.
At first Bryce could see nothing but the dull gleam of unpolished metal from the barrel of a revolver which protruded from behind a tree, but a further scrutiny showed him the dim outlines of a man"s figure standing in that place of gloom and ghosts. The man stepped out from his hiding-place, even as Bryce watched him, and was followed almost instantly by another man. They were both somewhere about the same height, in the neighbourhood of five feet ten. Their features were not visible, for each of them wore a handkerchief about his face in the time-honored fashion of the men of the road, and a hat pulled well down over the eyes completed the disguise.