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

far.”
    “No,” replied the mailman, as he prepared to ride off. “He looked like a death’s-head when I saw him. So-long.”
    The men turned their horses out and had a meal and a smoke; by this time they were talking about starting when the noise of an approaching dray attracted their attention.
    “He’s coming back himself,” said Tom.
    The dray crossed the creek and made for the old camp, where the driver pulled-up and got out. The full moon had risen, and it was fairly light.
    “Don’t speak,” said Devlin; “let us see what he is going to do.”
    The figure unharnessed the horses with much groaning, and hobbled them; then it took its blankets out of the dray and spread them underneath and lay down.
    “Let’s see if we can do anything for him,” said Devlin, and they approached.
    “Can we help you, mate?” he asked.
    There was no answer.
    He spoke again. Still silence.
    “Strike a match, Bill,” he said; “it’s all shadow under the dray.” Bill did as desired, and Devlin peered in. He started back.
    “Hell!” he cried, “the man did die when the woman said. He’s been dead forty-eight hours!”

THE WRAITH OF TOM IMRIE, by William Sylvester Walker
    From the Land of the Wombat (1899)
    Alas for this grey shadow once a man!
    —Tennyson
    Yet this way was left,
    And by this way I ’scaped them.
    — Ibid.
    William Sylvester Walker (1846-1926) was born at Hartlands, Heidelberg, near Melbourne, on 16 May 1846. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School, where he was a contemporary of Sir Edmund Barton, Australia’s first Prime Minister, and continued his studies in England at Wellesley House, Twickenham, and later at Worcester College, Oxford. As a university student he won the Worcester challenge skulls, played for the college first eleven cricket team, and was nominated for the University Trial Eights. He lived in New Zealand for fifteen years where he worked as a journalist and was editor of the Marlborough Press and later the Blenheim Times . It was in New Zealand that he began to write poems and short stories for popular periodicals of the time. Walker was the nephew of “Rolf Boldrewood” (whose real name was Thomas Alexander Browne), the great Australian colonial writer and author of Robbery Under Arms (1888), who evidently did not approve of his writing. He had three sons, two daughters and two step-daughters. In 1921 he took up residence with his family at Soroba House, Oban in Argyllshire, Scotland, and he died there at the age of eighty in 1926.
    And so you don’t believe in ghosts, you fellows?” said Mcllwaine, the squatter, one night as we sat around the cheery pine-log fire at Yerilla. “I do, and I will tell you my reasons. It is not the first time in my life that I have seen one, and I’ve heard that ghost-seeing runs in our family.
    “I saw the ghost of a man, a horse and a cattle dog one night as plain as I see each of you now, but the dog turned out to be real afterwards, and I don’t believe that he saw the ghost; anyway, he didn’t act as if he did. He was very serviceable to me, that dog. Twenty-five years ago, before some of you were born (you may well look, Jemmy, but it’s true), I was cattle-droving ‘store’ cattle from up north, and my chum was a man called Tom Imrie.
    “We camped one night on the Lower Tarcoo, and Tom and I left our head man and the others with the cattle and rode on to a bush hotel to put in the evening. There were about a dozen fellows there, a rather mixed lot; and some one was playing a concertina awfully well as we rode up. I never got that imitation peal of bells out of my head. ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clements,’ sort of thing. He played the different changes and triple bob majors, crashes and all the other thingummybobs nearly as well as George Cass himself, whoever he was. I did not know the player then, but I had cause to do so afterwards.
    “There were two other drovers in a private room at the hotel, who had