ake up?"

"If you'll drive in with me the two of us can dine together," Bryce
suggested. "That ought to give you time to wake up."

"I can't ask anything fairer than that," I agreed. "When do we start?"

"No time like the present. I've got the car paddocked down near the
reserve. It's only a matter of walking around the bluff. Come on."

I went along with him without comment, though I noticed that the last
thing he did was to bend down and pick up the piece of wood which had so
excited my curiosity earlier in the proceedings. It was small enough to
slip into his pocket, and this he did without a word either of apology
or explanation.

"It's a mighty innocent piece of wood," I thought, "but I'll bet all
Australia to an albatross that it's mixed up in the plot."

As we moved around the foot of the bluff I couldn't help turning the
situation over in my mind. Half an hour before I had been a wanderer on
the face of the earth, a man with no special abilities and no
outstanding vices. In that short space of time I had saved one man's
life, nearly taken that of another, and seemed in a fair way to make
money out of my twin attributes of steady nerves and good shooting. I
was still thinking in this strain when we rounded the bluff and
commenced to crawl across the intervening stretch of spinifex grass. I
say "crawl" advisedly. Bryce was far too heavy to do more than lumber
along and my feet were steadily getting worse. The spinifex grew
knee-high and its roots extended in all directions. They were hard,
knobby things that protruded through the loose sand, and every time I
took my attention off the ground for an instant I stubbed my toe against
one or the other of them. Bryce panted and puffed and wheezed and seemed
more like an hippopotamus than ever. Whatever might be the gain as far
as decency was concerned, his clothes, from a spectacular point of view,
made him look worse than ever. His collar was tight, and that made his
face the color of a scraped carrot, and his coat and trousers clung to
him in the most unexpected places--just where they shouldn't.

To make a long story short, we came at last to the edge of the spinifex,
and thence dropped steadily down into the hollow that contained the
reserve. I picked out Bryce's car right off. It was painted a battleship
grey, and if cars can have a personality, this had such another as its
owner. It wasn't slim--there was nothing of the racer about it. It was
squatly built