At his regular hour, just before sunrise, Robinson awoke and peeped from below the blanket.  He shook George.

“Getup directly, George.  We are wasting time when time is gold.”

“What is it?”

“‘What is it?’ There is a pilot in the sky that will take us out of this cursed trap, if the day does not come and spoil all.”

George’s eye followed Robinson’s finger, and in the center of the dark vault of heaven this glittered.

[Southern Cross constellation]

CHAPTER LXX.

“I KNOW it, Tom.  When I was sailing to this country we came to a part where the north star went down and down to the water’s edge, and this was all we got in exchange for it.”

“George,” said Tom, rather sternly, “how do you know they don’t hear us, and here we are surrounded by enemies, and would you run down our only friend?  That silver star will save our lives if they are to be saved at all.  Come on; and, George, if you were to take your revolver and blow out my brains, it is no more than I deserve for sleeping away the precious hours of night, when I ought to have been steering out of this cursed timber-net by that blessed star.”

With these words Robinson dived into the wood, steering due east by the Southern Cross.  It was like going through a frozen river.  The scrub was loaded with snow, which it discharged in masses on the travelers at every step.

“Keep your revolver dry in your hat and your lucifers, too,” cried Robinson.  “We shall have to use them both, ten to one.  As to our skins, that is hopeless.”

Then the men found how hard it is to take a line and keep it in the Australian bush.  When the Southern Cross was lost in a cloud, though but for a minute, they were sure to go all wrong, as they found upon its reappearance; and sometimes the scrub was impenetrable and they were forced to go round it and walk four hundred yards, advancing eastward but twenty or thirty.

Thus they battled on till the sun rose.

“Now we shall be all in the dark again,” said poor Robinson, “here comes a fog.”

“Stop, Tom,” said George; “oughtn’t we to make this good before we go on?”

“What do you mean?”

“We have come right by the star so far, have we not?”

“Yes.”

“Then let us bark fifty of these trees for a mark.  I have seen that varmint Jacky do that.”

“A capital idea, George; out with our knives—­here goes.”

“No breakfast to-day, Tom.”

“No, George, nor dinner, either, till we are out of the wood.”

These two poor fellows walked and ran and crept and struggled all day, sometimes hoping, sometimes desponding.  At last, at five o’clock in the afternoon, their bellies gnawed with hunger, their clothes torn to rags, their skin bleeding, they came out upon some trees with the bark stripped.  They gave one another a look that words can hardly paint.  They were the trees they had barked twelve hours ago!