nty
or thirty feet.

"Blocked!" said Bradby savagely.

"No," said Cumshaw in a tone that implied he refused to acknowledge
defeat. "There must be some way out, Jack, and I'm going to look until I
find it. Here, you take charge of the horses and I'll fossick out
something."

He was gone for ten minutes, ten long minutes that Bradby occupied in
cursing the valley in particular and the rest of the world in general.
Then there came a cry from the height above him, and, looking up, he saw
Abel Cumshaw waving to him. Next instant the man disappeared and a few
seconds later swung down through the rocks.

"It's no use," he said. "We can't take the horses out here. We'll just
have to leave them. A man can crawl up through a sort of funnel in the
wall of the rock, but you'd want a sling to get the horses along."

"Can't we go back and try the way we came in?"

Cumshaw shook his head decisively. "No," he said. "It won't do to risk
it. They just tumbled down yesterday when we brought them, but you must
remember that we had to cling on with our hands and feet when we went
back. We'll have to jettison the horses."

"You said it was murder yesterday when I suggested shooting them,"
Bradby reminded him.

"We had a chance of saving them then," Cumshaw argued, "but now it's
either them or us. If we turn them loose, the police'll find them sooner
or later. If we shoot them, it's over and done with, and even if anyone
does wander in here by accident he's not going to come this way. If we
let them roam about the valley, they naturally go over to the other side
where the grass is, and the first fool that blundered in would see them
and begin to wonder how they got there. You never want to give the other
man food for thought, Jack. Once he starts thinking, it's only a matter
of time until he noses out everything."

"Shoot the horses, Abel, and have done with it. I'm sick and tired of
talking. It's high time we did something."

The horses were shot then and there as the easiest way out of it, and
when the echoes had died away the two men crawled cautiously up the
funnel-like opening in the rock. Footholds were precarious enough, but
by dint of hanging on by teeth and claw the partners at length forced
their way to the top and stood on the ledge that overhung the valley.
Across the smoky sea of timber they caught sight of the long line of
golden wattle through which they had broken their way the previous
evening. It occurred to bot