Scurvy now began to affect the party.  We endeavoured to counteract the progress of this disease by plentiful issues of limejuice, and some portable vegetable soups, but of the latter we had but a very small supply.  Dysentery did not alarm us much for The Doctor generally set the patients to rights in eight and forty hours with something he found in the medicine chest.

February 28.

The morning was fine* when we again saw the plains of Mullaba on passing through the gorge under Mount Ydire.  As we travelled across the plains, on which the young verdure, first offspring of the late rain, already began to shoot, four emus were observed quietly feeding at no great distance, apparently heedless of our party.  I approached them with my rifle, on a steady old horse, and found that this large quadruped, however strange a sight, did not in the least alarm those gigantic birds, even when I rode close up.  I alighted, leveled my rifle over the saddle and fired but missed, as I presumed, for the bird merely performed a sort of pirouette, and then recommenced feeding with the others as before.  I had no means of reloading without returning to the party, but I was content with discovering that these birds might be thus approached on horseback for in general the first appearance of men, although miles distant, puts them at once to their speed which, on soft loose earth, perhaps surpasses that of a horse.

(Footnote.  “Felicissimos eran los tiempos” (the weather was fine) said Cervantes, which words Smollett literally translated:  “Happy were the times.”  Both meanings would apply to our case then.)

The ford of Wallanburra was now our only separation from the christian world.  That once passed, we might joyfully bid adieu to pestilence and famine, the lurking savage, and every peril of flood and field.  Under the sense of perfect security once more, and relieved from the anxiety inseparable from such a charge, every object within the territory of civilised man appeared to me tinged couleur de rose.

RE-CROSS THE PEEL.

The Peel was crossed without difficulty, and on the following morning, leaving the party in charge of Mr. White, I commenced my ride homeward through the woods, followed only by my man Brown; and on reaching Segenhoe I forwarded to the Government my official despatch, announcing the return of the party, and the result of the expedition.

...

CONCLUSION.

On my arrival at Sydney I learnt that the life of the convict Clarke had been spared, and that my report of the course of the Peel and the Namoi coinciding, as notified in my first despatch, with his description of these rivers, had encouraged the Government to place more confidence in his story.  It was now obvious however that the account of his travels beyond Tangulda was little else than pure invention.  I examined him in the hulk at Sydney in the presence of the acting Governor, and was quite satisfied that he had never been beyond the Nundewar range.  Nevertheless he persisted in his story of the river, and a party of mounted police commanded by Captain Forbes of the 39th regiment repaired to the Namoi, in search of a gang of bushrangers, but not without hopes of finding the Kindur.