The clay-pan interested Bony. On the soft sand there was but little hope of discovering anything, but the clay-pan might be revealing. He examined its surface with bent back, and sometimes also with bent knees. One particular spot held him for some time. He regarded it from several different angles, and from several varying altitudes, finally convincing himself that two lines almost invisible to him, and quite invisible to a white man, crossed the clay-pan and ended close beside a nest of the larger black ant. Those lines were made by car-wheels two months before. He had discovered the exact position of the abandoned car.

The sign made by the aboriginal-or aboriginals-next claimed his attention. Like all nomads the Australian native is profuse in his sign language, and the sign language is known to a far greater number of people than any one spoken tongue. It is evident that the sign language has been enriched by the coming of the white man, for to-day often the white man’s beer-bottles, his discarded motor-tyres, and the bones of the white man’s sheep and cattle, are used in conveying a message to be read by a black who possibly cannot understand a word of the sender’s spoken language.

The half-caste stood before and a little below the sign that had brought him from Sydney, eight hundred miles to the east. Nine fairly straight sticks, each about one foot in length, were fastened at one end by a piece of old pliable fencing wire, which was so interlaced that each stick was forced away from its neighbours in the form of a fan. He knew that this arrangement was one of five signs of death, and his gaze, moving downward two feet, dwelt on the sheep’s thigh-bone suspended from the fan-sticks by the same length of wire.

Now had it been a blackfellow who had died there, the bone would have come from the animal or bird representing the dead man’s tribal totem. If his tribal totem had been the emu, then a bone from that bird would have been used. But this bone was a sheep’s bone, and the sheep is entirely the white man’s animal. Had it been a bullock’s bone the meaning would have been the same, and for the same reason.