Ghost Stories and Mysteries Read Free

1890s, and was a good friend of Louis Becke who was also a master of the short form, compared in his day with Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1898 Favenc joined the Dawn and Dusk Club, a group of Bohemian writers and artists and it was around this time that his alcoholism began to take a toll on his health again. Certainly, by the end of the 1890s he was less productive and there was a marked decline in the quality of his work, although between 1899 and 1903 he did write six stories for Phil May’s Summer and Winter Annuals with Gothic and supernatural elements. At that time, the annuals were edited by Harry Thompson, who preferred tales of horror and the supernatural.
    By May 1905 Favenc was seriously ill in Royal Prince Albert Hospital, and later in year a bad fall that broke his thigh confined him to St Vincent’s Hospital. He died on 14 November 1908 in Lister Hospital in western Sydney.
    Further Reading
    Cheryl Frost, The Last Explorer, the Life and Work of Ernest Favenc (Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1983).
    Ernest Favenc, Tales of the Austral Tropics , edited by Cheryl Taylor (née Frost) (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, Colonial Texts Series,1997). This book collects the stories in The Last of Six and Tales of the Austral Tropics with a full scholarly introduction and critical apparatus.
    Index of Stories in Ernest Favenc’s Short Story Collections
    The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics (Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper, 1893)
    The Last of Six
    A Cup of Cold Water
    A Haunt of the Jinkarras
    The Rumford Plains Tragedy
    Spirit-Led
    Trantor’s Shot
    The Spell of the Mas-Hantoo
    The Track of the Dead
    The Mystery of Baines’ Dog
    Pompey
    Malchook’s Doom: A Nicholson River Story
    The Cook and the Cattle Stealer
    The Parson’s Blackboy
    A Lucky Meeting
    The Story of a Big Pearl
    The Missing Super
    That Other Fellow
    Tales of the Austral Tropics (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894)
    A Cup of Cold Water
    The Rumford Plains Tragedy
    A Haunt of the Jinkarras
    Trantor’s Shot
    Spirit-Led
    The Mystery of Baines’ Dog
    The Hut-Keeper and the Cattle-Stealer
    The Parson’s Blackboy
    A Lucky Meeting
    That Other Fellow
    Stolen Colours
    Bunthorpe’s Decease
    The Story of a Big Pearl
    My Only Murder and Other Tales (Melbourne: George Robertson & Co, 1899)
    My Only Murder
    A Tale of Vanderlin Island
    Blood for Blood
    The Other Mrs Brewer
    The Burial of Owen
    The Red Lagoon
    Tommy’s Ghost
    The New Super of Oakley Downs
    An Unquiet Spirit
    George Catinnun
    Bill Somers
    Jerry Boake’s Confession
    What Puzzled Balladune
    The Story of a Long Watch
    The Ghost’s Victory
    The Sea Gave up its Dead
    Mrs Stapleton No. 2
    The Boundary Rider’s Story
    The Eight-Mile Tragedy
    The Belle of Sagamodu
    Not Retributive Justice
    A Victim to Gratitude
    A North Queensland Temperance Story
    A Gum-Tree in the Desert
    A Note on the Texts
    The texts of the stories in this collection are taken from their book appearance, for which they were often substantially revised, apart from those that saw their first and only publication in periodicals. The stories are arranged in order of their first publication.

MY STORY
    (1875)
    I have tried to relate the following adventure as plainly and truthfully as possible. That it appears simply wild and impossible, I well know; but I have herein related nothing but the facts.
    It was in the year 1871 that three of us left the Cloncurry diggings, intending to push through to Port Darwin, prospecting as we went. We reached to within one hundred miles of the Roper River, when the strange event occurred which altered all our plans.
    My two companions were named, respectively, Owen Davy and Charles Morton Hawthorne; my name is James Drummond. Davy was an old friend; Hawthorne a comparative stranger, a well made, handsome fellow, middle aged, with dark eyes of peculiar force and brilliancy. He had a habit of looking intently into your eyes when