I was pretty certain they wouldn’t catch Jim, in spite of Goring being so cocksure about it. If he wasn’t knocked off the first mile or so, he’d find ways of stopping or steadying his horse, and facing him up to where we had gone to join father at the tableland of the Nulla Mountain. Once he got near there he could let go his horse. They’d be following his track, while he made the best of his way on foot to the path that led to the Hollow. If he had five miles’ start of them there, as was most likely, all the blacks in the country would never track where he got to. He and father could live there for a month or so, and take it easy until they could slip out and do a bit of father’s old trade. That was about what I expected Jim to do, and as it turned out I was as nearly right as could be. They ran his track for ten miles. Then they followed his horse-tracks till late the second day, and found that the horse had slewed round and was making for home again with nobody on him. Jim was nowhere to be seen, and they’d lost all that time, never expecting that he was going to dismount and leave the horse to go his own way.

They searched Nulla Mountain from top to bottom; but some of the smartest men of the old Mounted Police and the best of the stockmen in the old days—men not easy to beat—had tried the same country many years before, and never found the path to the Hollow. So it wasn’t likely anyone else would. They had to come back and own that they were beat, which put Goring in a rage and made the inspector, Sir Ferdinand Morringer, blow them all up for a lot of duffers and old women. Altogether they had a bad time of it, not that it made any difference to me.