The corridor dipped down every now and then, and was sufficiently rough walking for her frequently to require his helping hand. Once when it was withdrawn for him to cut away a prickly creeper that the late heavy rains had evidently detached from the outer rock she stumbled and fell, and in doing so hit her knee against a hard object, which she picked up. To her astonishment it was a horse's shoe.
"How could this possibly have got here?" she cried. "It is not conceivable that a horse could have climbed that wall and come in by the hole."
"The hole is big enough," said Trant, with his queer laugh, "and trained horses have been known to do more extraordinary feats even than that. The wall isn't really so steep as it looks. But," he added hastily, "it is far more likely that there has been a stockman here at some time—Sam Shehan, who threw the shoe against the rock and struck our hole with it probably, for I am quite of Mr. Frank Hallett's opinion," added Trant with candour, "that in the days before his reformation, Sam Shehan did a little cattle-duffing business and made use of this place, which is out of the way, and yet close at hand, as a plant."
"Mr. Trant," exclaimed Elsie, "does it not strike you that this is just the kind of place Moonlight might choose to hide in?"
"If it were," said Trant grimly, "I should have been a richer man by the £8,000 reward which a liberal Leichardt's Land Government offer for his capture, to say nothing of Lord Waveryng's £2,000. And if I had not chosen to avail myself of the opportunity, Sam Shehan would certainly have done so. We explored this spot thoroughly when Captain Macpherson was at the Gorge. Very likely the shoe was pitched over the wall then."
They emerged from the passage, which gave out upon an open ledge, and which, as they saw, skirted the quicksand. Descending sheer from the ledge was a precipice lapped by a long deep black lagoon, into which the sands shelved. The ledge, though fairly wide, would have been
