dom. It could be done! With prudence, it could
be done! He must be careful and abstemious! Abstemious! He had already
eaten too much, and he hastily pulled a barely-tasted piece of meat from
his mouth, and replaced it with the rest. The action which at any
other time would have seemed disgusting, was, in the case of this poor
creature, merely pitiable.

Having come to this resolution, the next thing was to disencumber
himself of his irons. This was more easily done than he expected. He
found in the shed an iron gad, and with that and a stone he drove out
the rivets. The rings were too strong to be "ovalled", * or he would
have been free long ago. He packed the meat and bread together, and
then pushing the gad into his belt--it might be needed as a weapon of
defence--he set out on his journey.

* Ovalled--"To oval" is a term in use among convicts, and
means so to bend the round ring of the ankle fetter that the
heel can be drawn up through it.

His intention was to get round the settlement to the coast, reach the
settled districts, and, by some tale of shipwreck or of wandering,
procure assistance. As to what was particularly to be done when he found
himself among free men, he did not pause to consider. At that point his
difficulties seemed to him to end. Let him but traverse the desert that
was before him, and he would trust to his own ingenuity, or the chance
of fortune, to avert suspicion. The peril of immediate detection was
so imminent that, beside it, all other fears were dwarfed into
insignificance.

Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles, and by husbanding
his food, he succeeded by the night of the fourth day in accomplishing
forty more. Footsore and weary, he lay in a thicket of the thorny
melaleuca, and felt at last that he was beyond pursuit. The next day he
advanced more slowly. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savage
jungle impeded his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose before
him. He was lost in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in
morasses. The sea that had hitherto gleamed, salt, glittering, and
hungry upon his right hand, now shifted to his left. He had mistaken his
course, and he must turn again. For two days did this bewilderment last,
and on the third he came to a mighty cliff that pierced with its blunt
pinnacle the clustering bush. He must go over or round this obstacle,
and he decided to go round it. A natural pathway wound about its foot