THE SHADOWS OF A SUMMER evening were lengthening across one of the lower reaches of the Brisbane.

It had been an exceptionally high tide, and the great stretch of water, dotted here and there with mangrove islands, was almost level with the river banks.

Some of the adjacent low-lying lands were submerged.

The after-glow lingered in the western sky, and its light, broken by the shadows of tall gum and bloodwood trees, was reflected, here and there, in weird patches of colour upon the water. There was just—only just—breeze enough to keep the mosquitoes quiet.

On the south side of the river a huge ocean steamer in ballast lay at anchor, the high water causing her great sides to tower above the bank, until passers-by on the neighbouring roadway might have thought that she had been stranded, and was shored up upon the land.

A coasting steamer had just passed up the river, and although she had turned the bend and was out of sight, the regular throbbing of her engines could be distinctly heard in the distance.

A schooner creeping past in perfect silence from the bay was beating up stream, making a long leg; she would soon have to ‘go about’ and make a short one, as what little wind there was blew in uncertain puffs from the west. Near shore, a yacht of a few tons had cast anchor, the slightest sound being audible as the crew made her snug. This being effected, they pushed off from the dainty little craft in a dingy. The crew numbered two men and a boy; the latter sat in the bows while one of the others sculled leisurely towards a landing-stage running out a short distance into the water at the foot of the garden, which belonged to a commodious and well-to-do residence.

The whole scene was suggestive of repose.

A flight of black swans, high above reach of fowling-pieces, moved slowly towards their feeding ground on the shores of Moreton Bay. Not infrequently large fishes threw themselves out of the still water in their gambols, the heavy splashes they made when falling back into the river being distinctly heard. It must have been nearly a mile from shore to shore.

The occupants of the dingy, however, had not far to row, and as on reaching the jetty they found the water to be within a few inches of the planking, they pulled the boat up upon the landing-stage, and, throwing their belongings over their shoulders, the two men sauntered leisurely up the garden walk to the house.

The place presented a semi-tropical appearance. Clumps of graceful bananas moved their broad pendulous leaves languidly in the fitful evening breeze. Pineapples were growing luxuriantly in the fruit garden, while near them were English apple and pear trees laden with fruit. In the matter of flowers the kindly earth seemed to have become a mother, for they grew in profusion everywhere—English and Australian and those of other lands—the very air was odorous with roses and carnations and mignonette, mingled with the perfume of tropical flowering shrubs.

“I hope you are in no hurry for dinner, Hartley,” said one of the two new arrivals, as they came upon the owner of the residence, stretched full length on a cane lounge under the wide verandah portico.

“Not for half an hour or so,” was the reply.

“That’s right,” said the previous speaker; “it would be too bad to go in and leave that after-glow and its reflection on the river, with no one to look at it.”

“People talk about the scenery of the Swiss lakes,” he said, looking down the river, “but when you catch this part of the Brisbane River in the gloaming, with a full tide, it is one of the most romantic spots in existence. It’s not grand, you know, but it’s downright interesting.

See, now, how it changes!”

“Do you often get it like this, Hartley?” asked the third man as, following his friend’s example, he stood and gazed at the truly wonderful scene.

“I don’t think that I have seen it half a dozen times just as it looks to-night, and never so beautiful as now,” replied Hartley, quietly.

“But we’ve had it much like this, twice in four days,” said the first speaker.

“You have,” said Hartley, sitting up and dropping his legs over the side of the lounge, while he felt leisurely about in the pockets of his loose jacket for his tobacco-pouch. “You have; it’s your luck!”

“It’s strange now,” he continued, as his two friends sat down and got ready for a smoke, “some of the biggest strokes of luck, and queerest adventures too, which have befallen men in any part of Australia have happened to the newly arrived. I don’t attempt to explain it,” he continued, “but facts show that the newer things are the more capricious is the luck. It has repeatedly happened, for instance, that when experienced miners have failed, and after months of heart-wearying toil have thrown up a ‘claim’ for a duffer, some raw new chum has come along and positively stumbled into a fortune. I could give you instances of such things by the score,” continued Bright Hartley, stretching himself and putting his hands into his trousers’-pockets with a self-satisfied air, as he looked through a cloud of tobacco-smoke, first at the river, and then at his friends.

It was as much as to say “I, Bright Hartley, was one of the lucky new chums.”

“Ah! that may be in regard to mining,” drawled out the long individual, who, with his feet elevated upon the rail of the verandah, now lay back in a large cane chair, smoking.

“Mining be hanged!” said Hartley, facing around; “it has been so in business, and in the learned professions, and politics, and in everything else. Australian luck is a thing which positively revels in surprises. You meet with men in all positions in life in the colonies, of whom, when you come to know them, you wonder how on earth they got to be where and what they are. It certainly was not their talents put them there, so, you see, it must have been their luck. You have an illustration of it in the very matter which you told me of last night, and I may say that it is because I attribute it solely to your unsophisticated good luck that I have a leaning towards it.”

“Go on,” said the long man, who saw that Hartley had more to say, and wanted encouragement.

“Well, I will make the application then,” continued Hartley. “You two fellows came to Australia simply because you were at a loose end. After roaming and shooting and yachting, and all the rest of it, over half the world, you profess to find nothing new under the sun. I suppose, now, that you, Buchanan, would give one of your fingers to have a really original adventure to talk about when you get back to England, and Sir Charles here aspires to literature, and talks of writing a book. Time is no object to either of you; you want adventure, and the queer thing about it is that for a hundred years or more the key to an adventure seems to have been awaiting you two English innocents down in Moreton Bay. It’s most extraordinary! Stoneham has known all about this matter for years, without mentioning it to a creature until you two come across him, and fairly stumble into what seems to me to be one of the queerest and most mysterious affairs in Australian history. You actually discover an unpublished and hitherto unknown letter, written by Captain Cook in 1770; you unearth a mysterious aboriginal apparition, and come here to me with ancient gold pieces in your possession, and an uncut diamond worth a king’s ransom, taking the whole thing as a regular matter of course, and half suggesting, notwithstanding the gold and diamond, that Stoneham has been trying to have you, because he is not able to produce a photograph of Long Tom!”

“That is the result of our having been had before,” said Sir Charles Dawson, laughing. “Some of your colonials would fill us to the brim with absurd stories if we would let them, in the hope that they might afterward meet with some of their nonsense in a book.”

“I don’t deny that,” said Hartley, excitedly, “but this thing is altogether different. Why, if what you have actually shown me only got into the hands of the newspaper men, they would cable it, word for word, to Europe, and you would set all the scientists of Christendom by the ears. The whole thing is so extraordinary that I have hardly thought of anything else all day. You see, you have facts before you, which all allow to be stubborn things. First of all, there’s the letter, which, if it is not genuine, must be accounted for in some other way. I’ll swear that neither Stoneham nor any other man down there could have written it. Then the gold pieces are certainly ancient, and the stone is genuine—I know a diamond when I see it, even if it is in the rough.”

“Then do you advise us to accept Stoneham’s offer?” said Buchanan with a yawn, as though it did not matter very much which way it was.

“Yes,” said Hartley, deliberately. “I have thought it carefully out; it will give you fellows something new to talk about on your return to Europe—that is, if you come back again, for there is always a spice of danger about interior travelling anywhere; and you will find it the same here, although we have no big game such as you meet with in the jungles of India and Africa. If I had not so much business on hand, upon my word, I’d feel inclined to make one of the party. Three or four months ought to do it, and then you will know how much truth there is in Stoneham’s story.”

“And supposing that we do not come back again?” said Sir Charles, with a smile.

“You are neither of you married,” said Hartley, “and if you should happen not to return, the girls you leave behind you will soon console themselves with other men. But what’s the use of talking nonsense. It’s only the good who die young.”

The speaker was Bright Hartley, of Brisbane, Sydney, and the Barcoo, and sundry other parts of the world in which he had possessions. He was one of the few Australians whose lives show an almost unbroken record of success. It was not so much his business of a general merchant as his outside speculations which had been so singularly fortunate. He always bought in and sold out at the right time. He had in turn gone into mining, sugar-growing, and station property, with equal success. It was a proverb among his acquaintances that Bright Hartley’s touch turned earth to gold. Men generally attributed it to his luck, and while Hartley would laughingly allow that he had been born under a lucky star, and was a strong believer in individual good fortune, he rightly claimed that foresight, sagacity, and secrecy had much to do with the satisfactory result.

Hartley was undoubtedly superstitious. There were men whom he regarded as unlucky, and with whom he would on no account have joined in any business transaction; and, among other superstitions, he had a belief that his good luck would leave him the moment he married.

“You see,” he would say, “a man must tell his wife, if he has one, and that spoils it all. I’ll make a big coup some day, perhaps, and then tie up everything in Government debentures, and bank shares, and house property, and risk it and get married.”

In the mean time, however, he made up for his celibacy by innumerable harmless flirtations, some of which, by the way, were with other men’s wives.

Bright Hartley was a fair man, rather below the average height, with blue eyes, and tow-coloured hair. He was as tight and round in his garments as is an average, middle-aged alderman, and was conversant with all sorts and conditions of Australian people, places, and things. He knew how to manage a sugar plantation or sheep station, or work a gold mine, and had seen a bit of cattle duffing on the Barcoo; but he also could tell you how Miss So-and-So’s stays came to be laced so tightly that she fainted at the last Government House ball. In fact, he read the whole secret of colonial life as from a book. There was nothing of any interest, bad or good, which he had not seen or heard about; and yet he had not a wrinkle on his brow, and could not be induced to own up to being anything over forty. That he was adventurous and speculative may be gathered from his conversation already recorded; and it should be said that, coming from such a well-informed and prosperous man, the advice he tendered had made a strong impression upon the minds of his two young friends.

“I can’t make you out,” said the senior of the two Englishmen, Sir Charles Dawson, who, with his friend and travelling companion, Captain Buchanan, were the ‘innocents’ Hartley had referred to. “As a matter of fact, you are as hard-headed as any one I have met with, and yet in this affair you appear to be most credulous. You cannot, surely, believe the whole of this most extraordinary story of Stoneham’s to be gospel?”

“Come and let us have dinner, and after that I will talk to you,” said Hartley.