They were there for no good, we agreed.Warrigal’s sharp eyes noted everything about the whole turn-out—the sergeant’s face that drove, the way the gold boxes were counted out and put in a kind of fixed locker underneath the middle of the coach. He saw where the troopers sat before and behind, and I’ll be bound came away with a wonderful good general idea of how the escort travelled, and of a good many things more about it that nobody guessed at. As for Moran, we could see him fix his eyes upon the sergeant who was driving, and look at him as if he could look right through him. He never took his eyes off him the whole time, but glared at him like a maniac; if some of his people hadn’t given him a shove as they passed he would soon have attracted people’s attention. But the crowd was too busy looking at the well-conditioned prancing horses and the neatly got up troopers of the escort drag to waste their thoughts upon a common bushman, however he might stare.When he turned away to leave lie ground out a red-hot curse betwixt his teeth. It made us think that Warrigal’s coming about with him on this line counted for no good.

They slipped through the crowd again, and, though they were pretty close, they never saw us. Warrigal would have known us however we might have been altered, but somehow he never turned his head our way. He was like a child, so taken up with all the things he saw that his great-grandfather might have jumped up from the Fish River Caves, or wherever he takes his rest, and Warrigal would never have wondered at him.

“That’s a queer start!” says Jim, as we walked on our homeward path. “I wonder what those two crawling, dingo-looking beggars were here for? Never no good. I say, did you see that fellow Moran look at the sergeant as if he’d eat him? What eyes he has, for all the world like a black snake! Do you think he’s got any particular down on him?”

“Not more than on all police. I suppose he’d rub them out, every mother’s son, if he could. He and Warrigal can’t stick up the escort by themselves.”