THE SEA-BIRDS’ MESSAGE. 13

Late the next night Joe Galvin rode up to the station, the master of which employed
him, and wild with grief and excitement implored that a search party might be got
together to hunt for the two children, lost in the bush. He had come home that morning
to hear the news, and Polly in her remorse and anxiety had told him of her plan of
punishing Dick, and of how she feared that Janie had taken the boy away to escape the
beating she had threatened. Joe Galvin in his fury struck his wife and left her, while he
went wandering madly along the lake shore, and through the bush near the hut seeking
for tracks and finding none, for the rain of the night before had washed out all marks of
the little footsteps. Then he mounted his horse and galloped to the station for help.

It was not long before the search-party set out—the master and two young men of the
station, Galvin and four Duels trackers, each two going a different way and searching
during the night while the moon lasted. They beat about towards
different points of the lake shore, and when there came the pitch
darkness before dawn, they made
fires and coo-eed. And the master
tells how he and, Galvin walking
together - would pause, and start,
and rush wildlyin some direction
when they fancied achild’s cry came,
only to find that - it was the cry of
a curlew or of some other night
bird, or the sound .,of the wind
,soughing eerily through the oaks.

The wind blew fiercely that night, and
the tree-islet with the two little beings upon
it drifted back to shore. In 0 AGES the morning the
bush-boys found tracks of children’s feet upon a cane ‘hill near the lake. A shout of joy
went out,and with frenzied eagerness Joe Galvin followed the tiny footmarks. The trackers
lost them again, found them once more, followed them along a gulley bed, and once more
lost them. It was almost evening when they stopped at the foot. of a little stony hillock
attracted by an eagle hawk eins in the air.

A terrible fear smote Galvin. He motioned to the master to go first, and hung back,
his limbs tottering, brawny bushman as he was, like the limbs of one faint to death. The
master stepped forward. It was under a rocky knoll overgrown with wattle and scarlet
kennedia that he saw the children lying. At first he thought that they had stopped to
rest, and were only sleeping. Dickie was clasped tight in Janie’s arms, and Janie lay, her
head upon a stone, her face upturned with a smile upon her poor swollen lips. When he
went closer he saw that they were dead.