So I took aim and waited till they were just crossing the creek into the forest. The leading man was just riding up the bank, and the one that led Jim’s horse was on the bit of a sand bed that the water had brought down. He was the least bit ahead of Jim, when I pulled trigger, and sent a ball into him, just under the collarbone. I fired high on purpose. He drops off his saddle like a dead man. The next minute Billy the Boy raises the most awful corroboree of screams and howls, enough for a whole gang of bush-rangers, if they went in for that sort of thing. He emptied four chambers of his revolver at the leading trooper right away, and I fired at his horse. The constable never doubted—the attack was so sudden and savage like—but there was a party of men hid in the brush. Billy’s shots had whistled round him, and mine had nearly dropped his horse, so he thought it no shame to make a bolt and leave his mate, as seemed very bad hit, in our hands.

His horse’s hand-gallop growed fainter and fainter in the distance, and then we unbound poor Jim, set his feet at liberty, and managed to dispose of the handcuffs. Jim’s face began to look more cheerful but he was down in the mouth again when he saw the wounded man. He began at once to do all he could for him. We stopped a short distance behind the brush, which had already helped us well.

Jim propped up the poor chap, whose life-blood was flowing red through the bullet-hole, and made him as comfortable as he could. “I must take your horse, mate,” he says; “but you know it’s only the fortune of war. A man must look after himself. Someone’ll come along the road soon.” He mounted the trooper’s horse and we slipped through the trees—it was getting dark now—till we came to our horses. Then we all rode off together. We took Billy the Boy with us until he put us on to a road that led us into the country that we knew. We could make our own way from there, and so we sent off our scout, telling him to ride to the nearest township and say he’d seen a trooper lying badly wounded by the Bargo Brush roadside. The sooner he was seen to, the better chance he’d have.

Jim brightened up considerably after this. He told me how he’d gone back to say good-bye to Jeanie—how the poor girl went into fits, and he couldn’t leave her. By the time she got better the cottage was surrounded by police; there was no use being shot down without a chance, so he gave himself up.