“Only to think,” says he, “that we might have had all this fun some day, and bought and paid for it honest. Now it isn’t paid for. It’s out of some other man’s pocket. There’s a curse on it; it will have to be paid in blood or prison time before all’s done. I could shoot myself for being such a cursed fool.”

“Too late to think of that,” I said; “we’ll have some fun in Mel bourne for a bit, anyhow. For what comes after we must ‘chance it,’ as we’ve done before, more than once or twice, either.”

Next day our steamer was to sail. We got Starlight to come down with us and show us how to take our passage. We’d never done it before, and felt awkward at it. He’d made up his mind to go to New Zealand, and after that to Honolulu, perhaps to America.

“I’m not sure that I’ll ever come back, boys,” he said, “and if I were you I don’t think I would either. If you get over to San Francisco you’d find the Pacific Slope a very pleasant country to live in. The people and the place would suit you all to pieces. At any rate I’d stay away for a few years and wait till all this blows over.”

I wasn’t sorry when the steamer cleared the port, and got out of sight of land. There we were—where we’d never been before—in blue water. There was a stiff breeze, and in half-an-hour we shouldn’t have turned our heads if we’d seen Hood and the rest of ‘em come riding after us on seahorses, with warrants as big as the mainsail. Jim made sure he was going to die straight off, and the pair of us wished we’d never seen Outer Back Momberah, nor Hood’s cattle, nor Starlight, nor Warrigal. We almost made up our minds to keep straight and square to the last day of our lives. However, the wind died down a bit next day, and we both felt a lot better—better in body and worse in mind—as often happens. Before we got to Melbourne we could eat and drink, smoke and gamble, and were quite ourselves again. We’d laid it out to have a reg’lar good month of it in town, takin’ it easy, and stopping nice and quiet at a good hotel, havin’ some reasonable pleasure. Why shouldn’t we see a little life? We’d got the cash, and we’d earned that pretty hard. It’s the hardest earned money of all, that’s got on the cross, if fellows only knew, but they never do till it’s too late.