“You’re young and soft, Dick,” Starlight said to me as we were rumbling along in the coach next day, with hand and leg-irons on, and a trooper opposite to us. “Why don’t I feel like it? My good fellow, I have felt it all before. But if you sear your flesh or your horse’s with a red-hot iron you’ll find the flesh hard and callous ever after. My heart was seared once—ay, twice—and deeply, too. I have no heart now, or if I ever feel at all it’s for a horse. I wonder how old Rainbow gets on.”

“You were sorry father let us come in the first time,” I said. “How do you account for that, if you’ve no heart?”

“Really! Well, listen, Richard. Did I? If you guillotine a man—cut off his head, as they do in France, with an axe that falls like the monkey of a piledriver—the limbs quiver and stretch, and move almost naturally for a good while afterwards. I’ve seen the performance more than once. So I suppose the internal arrangements immediately surrounding my heart must have performed some kind of instinctive motion in your case and Jim’s. By the way, where the deuce has Jim been all this time? Clever James!”

“Better ask Evans here if the police knows. It is not for want of trying if they don’t.”

“By the Lord Harry, no!” said the trooper, a young man who saw no reason not to be sociable. “It’s the most surprisin’ thing out where he’s got to. They’ve been all round him, reg’lar cordon-like, and he must have disappeared into the earth or gone up in a balloon to get away.”

Chapter XIX

CHAPTER XIX

It took us a week’s travelling or more to get to Berrima. Sometimes we were all night in the coach as well as all day. There were other passengers in the coach with us. Two or three bushmen, a station overseer with his wife and daughter, a Chinaman, and a lunatic that had come from Nomah, too. I think it’s rough on the public to pack madmen and convicts in irons in the same coach with them. But it saves the Government a good deal of money, and the people don’t seem to care. They stand it, anyhow.