Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction by James Doig Page A

quivering of the atmosphere prevented them distinguishing the figure properly until within half-a-mile of the place.
    “Hanged if I don’t believe it’s a woman!” said the man who had first spoken, whose name was Tom Devlin.
    “It is so,” said the other two, after a pause.
    Devlin walked to where the waterbags had been hung to cool, and, taking one down, went out into the glaring sunshine to meet the approaching figure.
    It was a woman. Weary, worn-out, and holding in her hand a dry and empty waterbag. Although only middle-aged, she had that tanned and weather-beaten appearance that all women get, sooner or later, in North Queensland.
    With a sigh of gratitude she took the waterbag from Tom’s hand and put the bottle-mouth to her lips, bush fashion. There is no more satisfactory drink in the world for a thirst person than that to be obtained straight from the nozzle of a waterbag.
    Tom regarded the woman pityingly. She was dressed in common print and a coarse straw hat, and looked like the wife of a teamster.
    “Where have you come from, missus, and what brought you here?”
    “We were camped on Huckey’s Creek, and my husband died last night. I couldn’t find the horses this morning, so I started back here.”
    “Fifteen miles from here,” said Devlin. “We are going to camp there tonight, and will see after it. You come in and rest.”
    He took her back to the little inn, where she could get something to eat and a room to lie down in. Then they caught their horses and started, promising to look up the strayed animals and attend to everything, according to the directions the woman gave them.
    The three men arrived at Huckey’s Creek about an hour before sundown. They examined the place thoroughly, but neither dray, horses, nor anything else was visible. The marks of a camp and the tracks bore out the woman’s story, but that was all.
    “Deuced strange!” said Devlin. “Somebody must have come along and shook the things, but what did they do with the man’s body? They wouldn’t hawk that about with them.”
    “Here’s the mailman coming,” said one of the others, as a man coming towards them with a packhorse hove in sight.
    They awaited his approach, standing dismounted on the bank of the creek. The mailman’s thirsty horses plunged their noses deep in the water and drank greedily.
    “I say, you fellows,” he called out, “you didn’t see a woman on foot aboutanywhere, did you?”
    “Yes,” replied Tom, “she is back at the shanty.”
    “Wait ’til I come up,” said the mailman. When his horses had finished he rode the bank to the others.
    “Such a queer go,” he said. “About five or six miles from here I met a tilted dray with horses, driven by a man who looked downright awful. He pulled up, and so did I. Then he said, staring straight before him, and not looking at me, ‘You didn’t meet a woman on foot, mate, did you?’
    “I told him no, and asked him where he was going. ‘Oh,’ he said, just in the same queer way, ‘I’m going on until I overtake her.’
    “‘You’d best turn back,’ I said. ‘It’s twenty-five miles to the next water; and I tell you I’d have been bound to see her.’ He shook his head and drove on, and you say the woman’s back at the shanty?”
    “Yes; it’s about the rummiest story I ever come across. The woman turned up at Britten’s today, about 1 o’clock, on foot, and said that her husband died during the night; that she could not find the horses, and had come in on foot for help.”
    “I suppose he wasn’t dead, after all, and when the horses came in for water he harnessed up and went ahead, looking for his wife, in a dazed, stupid sort of a way.”
    “I suppose that is it,” said Devlin. “Are you going on to Britten’s tonight?” he asked the mailman.
    “Yes.”
    “You might tell the woman that her husband has come-to, and started on with the dray. After we have had a spell, we’ll go after him. He can’t be