‘Campfire, boss. Long time ago,’ he explained, unnecessarily. The blackened stick had a furry coating of moss on one side. Many small bones lay scattered on the ground. Toby recognised the femur of a wallaby and the skull of a possum discarded in the grass.

‘Let’s get back to the others,’ he said. ‘We’ll bring them here.’

‘You wanted to find an Aborigine camp, Angus,’ Toby said, pointing at the tumbledown structures when they returned. ‘Doesn’t look like it’s been used for a couple of years.’

McTavish swung from his horse and strode between the old gunyahs. He stooped to look into one gloomy interior, then another. Finally, he turned back to Toby and the others.

‘This fellow Anderson escaped from a convict work party some years ago. He was chased as far as the escarpment before the soldiers gave up.’ He walked back to his horse and took the reins. ‘Every now and then a settler would report seeing a white man among a group of natives, but no one was sure. No one wanted to come up here and look for a convict bolter. This tribe remained out of contact for a long time. I suppose they looked after Anderson, fed him and so on. The poor buggers were unaware of the evil they were harbouring.’

‘But what happened to the Aborigines?’ Sloan asked.

‘I don’t know, laddie. They may have gone down to the settled areas, as a lot of tribes do. Maybe they went deeper into the bush. By all accounts this mob was a pretty reclusive lot. But I’ll bet a week’s pay these are the same Aborigines Anderson found.’

Toby looked at Paddy and shifted the Lovell in his hands. He could sense Anderson’s malevolent presence, somewhere out there in the bush. He said, ‘We can camp here tonight. Tomorrow we’ll follow the tracks into the interior.’

To continue north into high and wild country on foot would be suicide. Starvation and death awaited in that direction. He had deliberately travelled north to take him away from any pursuit that may have tracked him to the edge of the escarpment, but Anderson knew if he stood any chance of making it out of the mountains, he would now need to head west, to the fertile river valleys where settlers lived. If he could reach a settlement or road, he could steal a couple of horses and come back for the rest of the gold.

The saddlebags were slung over his shoulder, and they thumped against his chest and back as he picked his way through the trees. The revolver was tucked into his belt and he carried a small calico bag containing spare powder and shot, a roll of banknotes and a few pounds of flour. It wasn’t much, he knew, but with a little luck he would soon be out of these cursed hills and able to spend a little of the money or gold dust on a meal at an inn or homestead – or use his gun to get what he wanted.