“You’re a regular pearl of discretion, my dear,” says Starlight. “and it’s a pity, like some other folks, you haven’t a better field for the exercise of your talents. However, that’s very often the way in this world, as you’ll perhaps find out when you’re old and ugly, and the knowledge can’t do you any good. Tell us all you heard about the coach accident.”

“My word! it was the greatest lark out,” says Maddie. She’d twice the fun in her the other had, and was that good-tempered nothing seemed to put her out. “Everybody as come here seemed to have nothing else to talk about. Those that was going to the diggings, too, took it much easier than those that was coming away.”

“How was that?”

“Well, the chaps that come away mostly have some gold. They showed us some pretty fair lumps and nuggets, I can tell you. They seemed awfully gallied about being stuck up and robbed of it, and they’d heard yarns of men being tied to trees in the bush and left there to die.”

“Tell them for me, my fair Madeline, that Starlight and Company don’t deal with single diggers; ours is a wholesale business—eh, Dick? We leave the retail robbery to meaner villains.”

We had the horses that quiet by this time that we could drive them the rest of the way to the Turon by ourselves. We didn’t want to be too big a mob at Barnes’s house. Anyone might come in accidental, and it might get spread about. So after supper Warrigal was sent back; we didn’t want his help any more, and he might draw attention. The way we were to take in the horses, and sell them, was all put up.

Jim and I were to drive them the rest of the way across the ranges to the Turon. Barnes was to put us on a track he knew that would take us in all right, and yet keep away from the regular highway. Starlight was to stay another day at Barnes’s, keeping very quiet, and making believe, if anyone came, to be a gentleman from Port Phillip that wasn’t very well. He’d come in and see the horses sold, but gammon to be a stranger, and never set eyes on us before.

“My word!” said Barnes, who just came in at the time, “you’ve made talk enough for all the countryside with that mail coach racket of yours. Every man, woman, and child that looks in here’s sure to say, ‘Did you hear about the Goulburn mail being stuck up?’