It was all over now—the worst had come. What fools we had been not to take the old man’s advice, and clear out when he did. He was safe in the Hollow, and would chuckle to himself—and be sorry, too—when he heard of my being taken, and perhaps Jim. The odds were he might be smashed against a tree, perhaps killed, at the pace he was going on a horse he could not guide.

They searched the house, but the money they didn’t get. Jim and I had taken care of that, in case of accidents. Mother sat rocking herself backwards and forwards, every now and then crying out in a pitiful way, like the women in her country do, I’ve heard tell, when some one of their people is dead; “keening,” I think they call it. Well, Jim and I were as good as dead. If the troopers had shot the pair of us there and then, same as bushmen told us the black police did their prisoners when they gave ‘em any trouble, it would have been better for everybody. However, people don’t die all at once when they go to the bad, and take to stealing or drinking, or any of the devil’s favourite traps. Pity they don’t, and have done with it once and for all.

I know I thought so when I was forced to stand there with my hands chained together for the first time in my life (though I’d worked for it, I know that); and to see Aileen walking about laying the cloth for breakfast like a dead woman, and know what was in her mind.

The troopers were civil enough, and Goring, the senior constable, tried to comfort them as much as he could. He knew it was no fault of theirs; and though he said he meant to have Jim if mortal men and horses could do it he thought he had a fair chance of getting away. “He’s sure to be caught in the long-run, though,” he went on to say. “There’s a warrant out for him, and a description in every Police Gazette in the colonies. My advice to him would he to come back and give himself up. It’s not a hanging matter, and as it’s the first time you’ve been fitted, Dick, the judge, as like as not, will let you off with a light sentence.”