Ghost Stories and Mysteries. Ernest Favenc
Spirit-Led
Trantor’s Shot
The Spell of the Mas-Hantoo
The Track of the Dead
The Mystery of Baines’ Dog
Pompey
Malchook’s Doom: A Nicholson River Story
The Cook and the Cattle Stealer
The Parson’s Blackboy
A Lucky Meeting
The Story of a Big Pearl
The Missing Super
That Other Fellow
Tales of the Austral Tropics (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894)
A Cup of Cold Water
The Rumford Plains Tragedy
A Haunt of the Jinkarras
Trantor’s Shot
Spirit-Led
The Mystery of Baines’ Dog
The Hut-Keeper and the Cattle-Stealer
The Parson’s Blackboy
A Lucky Meeting
That Other Fellow
Stolen Colours
Bunthorpe’s Decease
The Story of a Big Pearl
My Only Murder and Other Tales (Melbourne: George Robertson & Co, 1899)
My Only Murder
A Tale of Vanderlin Island
Blood for Blood
The Other Mrs Brewer
The Burial of Owen
The Red Lagoon
Tommy’s Ghost
The New Super of Oakley Downs
An Unquiet Spirit
George Catinnun
Bill Somers
Jerry Boake’s Confession
What Puzzled Balladune
The Story of a Long Watch
The Ghost’s Victory
The Sea Gave up its Dead
Mrs Stapleton No. 2
The Boundary Rider’s Story
The Eight-Mile Tragedy
The Belle of Sagamodu
Not Retributive Justice
A Victim to Gratitude
A North Queensland Temperance Story
A Gum-Tree in the Desert
A Note on the Texts
The texts of the stories in this collection are taken from their book appearance, for which they were often substantially revised, apart from those that saw their first and only publication in periodicals. The stories are arranged in order of their first publication.
MY STORY
(1875)
I have tried to relate the following adventure as plainly and truthfully as possible. That it appears simply wild and impossible, I well know; but I have herein related nothing but the facts.
It was in the year 1871 that three of us left the Cloncurry diggings, intending to push through to Port Darwin, prospecting as we went. We reached to within one hundred miles of the Roper River, when the strange event occurred which altered all our plans.
My two companions were named, respectively, Owen Davy and Charles Morton Hawthorne; my name is James Drummond. Davy was an old friend; Hawthorne a comparative stranger, a well made, handsome fellow, middle aged, with dark eyes of peculiar force and brilliancy. He had a habit of looking intently into your eyes when speaking, with a weird stern look that would, without doubt, confuse any man of nervous temperament. His face was marked with a scar extending in a diagonal direction across his upper lip; his mustache partly covered it, but you could trace the course of the seam by the unequal growth of the hair.
Davy and I had made his acquaintance by accident, about a fortnight before leaving the Cloncurry. He had expressed a great wish to join us when our proposed expedition was spoken of, and it ended in his accompanying us.
For the first few weeks we agreed together capitally; our new mate made himself an agreeable companion, and proved to be a good bush man. After a time, however, the novelty wore away, and he showed decided symptoms of laziness, besides assuming an authoritative, dictatorial tone, when any of our movements were under discussion. At last, beyond saddling his own horse in the morning, and perhaps making a languid attempt to light a fire, he fairly shirked all his share of the necessary work of the camp. Davy, a hot-tempered little Welshman, had had several quarrels with him; and one evening but for my interference they would have come to blows. The conviction was forced upon me that night that Hawthorne, in spite of his lordly airs and stern looking, black eyes, was at bottom but a coward. I could see the look of relief come upon his face when I stepped between and insisted upon the dispute ending; and many times afterwards I saw gleams of hatred in his eyes that showed the tiger cruelty he harbored within him. An older man than Davy, I had my temper more under control, and though I knew that Hawthorne disliked me, we managed to continue our intercourse with one another upon the terms of ordinary civility. In the days of good friendship, Hawthorne had contributed greatly to relieve the monotony of our journey by his brilliant and to a certain extent fascinating conversation; he evidently knew a good deal of the world, and of fast if not good society. He had often spoken mysteriously of being in possession of a wonderful secret, but his hints were always so vague, that Davy and I thought but little about the matter until after the strange event occurred that I am going to relate.
Davy and Hawthorne had ceased to speak to each other; the day’s journey was generally performed in a moody, discontented manner; and I was thinking of proposing to abandon all prospecting and make straight for Port Darwin, when the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly changed. We had been out between four and five weeks, our horses were still in capital condition, and our supply of rations good. Since leaving Bourketown we had not seen the face of a white man, we had met with but slight difficulties with the blacks, and were now we thought within about one hundred miles of the Roper River, without having found the slightest indication of payable gold. This was the state of affairs on the 31st of November, 1871, when we unsaddled for our midday camp on the bank of a small creek.
The country through which we had been travelling for the last three days had been of a poor, sandy description, covered with forest tea-trees and stunted ironbark. The ridges were badly grassed, but here and there, on small flats on the banks of the creeks, we got good picking for the horses; and it was on such a small flat, situated in the bend of a sandy creek, that we turned out on this particular day. After unpacking, Davy took the billies and went down to the creek to get water; he was some time away; when he came back he put the billies down, and said:
“I saw fresh horse tracks in the bed of the creek.”
Hawthorne, who was kneeling down lighting a fire, looked up eagerly, but did not speak.
“Many?” I asked.
“Seems only two,” he replied; “one of them has been rolling in the sand.”
“Who on earth can it be?” I conjectured. “People prospecting or looking for country, I suppose. But if so, there must be more tracks about, for they would have more than two horses.”
“They may have left or lost them higher up the creek; they seem to have come down, and cannot be far off, for the tracks were only made this morning.”
Hawthorne had not before spoken; he now remarked, in a strangely conciliatory tone, that “Davis was doubtless right—the horses must have come up the creek, and that