When we got round the rock the track was plain again; it had been well worn once, though neither foot nor hoof much had been along it for many a year. It takes a good while to wear out a track in a dry country.

The gully widened out bit by bit, till at last we came to a little round green flat, right under the rock walls which rose up a couple of thousand feet above it on two sides. On the fiat was an old hut—very old it seemed to be, but not in bad trim for all that. The roof was of shingles, split, thick, and wedge shaped; the walls of heavy ironbark slabs, and there was a stone chimney.

Outside had been a garden; a few rose trees were standing yet, ragged and stunted. The wallabies had trimmed them pretty well, but we knew what they were. Been a corn-patch, too—the marks where it had been hoed up were there, same as they used to do in old times when there were more hoes than ploughs and more convicts than horses and working bullocks in the country.

“Well, this is a rum start,” says, Jim, as we sat down on a log outside that looked as if it had been used for a seat before. “Who the deuce ever built this gunyah and lived in it by himself for years and years? You can see it was no two or three months’ time he done here. There’s the spring coming out of the rock he dipped his water from. The track’s reg’lar worn smooth over the stones leading to it. There was a fence round this garden, some of the rails lying there rotten enough, but it takes time for sound hardwood to rot. He’d a stool and table, too, not bad ones either, this Robinson Crusoe cove. No end of manavelins either. I wonder whether he come here before them first—Government men—chaps we heard of. Likely he did and died here too. He might have chummed in with diem, of course, or he might not. Perhaps Starlight knows something about him, or Warrigal. We’ll ask him.”

We fossicked about for a while to see if the man who lived so long by himself in this lonely place had left anything behind him to help us make out what sort he was. We didn’t find much. There was writing on the walls here and there, and things cut on the fireplace posts. Jim couldn’t make head or tail of them, nor me either.