“Yes; not at him, though. Tell you all about it in the morning. He’s eaten nothing, and we’ve been travelling best part of twenty-four hours right off the reel.”

“Hold him up while I fetch out the pannikin. There’s plenty of grub inside. He’ll be all right after a sleep.”

A drop of rum and water brought him to, and after that we made ourselves a cup of tea and turned in. The sun was pretty high when I woke. When I looked out there was the old man sitting on the log by the fire, smoking. What was a deal more curious, I saw the half-caste, Warrigal, coming up from the flat, leading a horse and carrying a pair of hobbles. Something made me look over to a particular corner where Starlight always slept when he was at the Hollow. Sure enough there was the figure of a man rolled up in a cloak. I knew by the way his boots and things were thrown about that it could be no other than Starlight.

Chapter XXXII

CHAPTER XXXII

I’d settled in my mind that it couldn’t be anyone else, when he sat up, yawned, and looked round as if he had not been away from the old place a week.

“Ha! Richard, here we are again! ‘Feeds the boar in the old frank?’ The governor told me you and Jim had made back. Dreadful bore, isn’t it? Just when we’d rubbed off the rust of our bush life and were getting civilised. I feel very seriously ill-treated, I assure you. I have a great mind to apply to the Government for compensation. That’s the worst of these new inspectors, they are so infernally zealous.”

“You were too many for them, it seems. I half thought you might have been nailed. How the deuce did you get the office in time?”

“The faithful Warrigal, as usual, gave me timely warning, and brought a horse, of course. He will appear on the Judgment Day leading Rainbow, I firmly believe. Why he should be so confoundedly anxious about my welfare I can’t make out—I can’t, really. It’s his peculiar form of mania, I suppose. We all suffer from some madness or other.”

“How the blazes did he know the police were laid on to the lot of us?” I said.