As a matter of fact, the boat was, by a little series of coincidences, in which the ocean sometimes indulges, carried round into the mouth of the Clarence River to fall at last into the hands of Tom Pagdin. She was first picked up by a fisherman near the Heads. He sold her to a dealer, who had a little trade steamer running up one of the creeks. She had broken adrift one night from the stern of the steamer, and the tide brought her into the Broadstream, where a farmer found her with her nose stuck in the mud next morning.
The farmer, in hope of a reward, in turn, had hidden her in the reeds, and it was there Tom Pagdin found her. He surmised that she was a stray boat, unhitched her, took her further up the stream one evening, and planted her again in the reeds of the opposite bank.
Jean Petit presented a peculiar appearance as he slunk across the sand in his rags, and disappeared in the bush.
The bush has seen many strange characters, of comedy and tragedy; has witnessed in her solitudes many ludicrous and awful things, but none, perhaps, more ludicrously awful than the hairy figure in streaming rags, which stalked slowly along, like a bedraggled bird of prey, beneath the shade of honeysuckle and gum.
For three days this beast-man, whom the clean sea had spewed up on the land, went northward.
He made himself a lair under the rocks, or in the thick bushes at night, and fed upon roots and berries, now and then descending the sandy hills to the sea for shellfish and oysters.
Gradually those livid sores which had corroded his flesh as verdigris corrodes copper, began to disappear.
Hans Holterman had run away from his ship in Hobson’s Bay to the goldfields in the time of the gold fever. He had, like many more, followed the Yellow Butterfly for years across mountain and gully and plain, till at last the growing stiffness in his joints told him that it was time to think of old age.
So Hans, who had never been a practical man, went prospecting for a selection as he went prospecting for gold—in the further places,—and at last pegged out his land.
It was not particularly good land, although heavily timbered; but Hans believed it would grow vines, and he remembered the days, before he ran away to sea, when, with his German brothers and sisters, he had worked amidst his father’s grape vines by the banks of beloved Rhine.