CHAPTER XIII

LI CHANG, GENTLEMAN TWO men sat in a grassy hollow on the plateau, smoking. Night had fallen, but a half-moon rode high, flooding the land with a soft light, against which the sentinel crags showed misty and ghost-like. A mopoke’s plaintive call came on the night-breeze; it was the only sound that broke the stillness. Behind the men yawned the mouth of a rock-cave, wide and gloomy: so deep that it was impossible to see more than a few feet from the opening. Blankets and fern formed two beds across the mouth; farthe…