When we rode up they all came forward and we had it out. We knew who was coming and were ready for ‘em. There was Moran, of course, quiet and savage-looking, just as like a black snake as ever, twisting about with his deadly glittering eyes, wanting to bite someone. There was Daly and Burke, Wall and Hulbert, and two or three more—I won’t say who they were now—and if you please who should come out of the hut last but Master Billy the Boy, as impudent as you like, with a pipe in his mouth, and a revolver in his belt, trying to copy Moran and Daly. I felt sorry when I see him, and thought what he’d gradually come to bit by bit, and where he’d most likely end, all along of the first money he had from father for telegraphing. But after all I’ve a notion that men and women grow up as they are intended to from the beginning. All the same as a tree from seed. You may twist it this road or that, make it a bit bigger or smaller according to the soil or the way it’s pruned and cut down when it’s young, but you won’t alter the nature of that tree or the fruit that it bears. You won’t turn a five-corner into a quince, or a geebung into an orange, twist and twine, and dig and water as you like. So whichever way Billy the Boy had been broken and named he’d have bolted and run off the course. Take a pet dingo now. He might look very tame and follow them that feed him, and stand the chain; but as soon as anything passed close that he could kill, he’d have his teeth into it and be lapping its blood before you could say “knife,” and the older he got the worse he’d be.

“Well, Dick,” says this young limb of Satan, “so you’ve took to the Queen’s highway agin, as the chap says in the play. I thought you and Jim was a-going to jine the Methodies or the Sons of Temperance at Turon, you both got to look so thunderin’ square on it. Poor old Jim looks dreadful down in the mouth, don’t he, though?”

“It would be all the better for you if you’d joined some other body, you young scamp,” I said. “Who told you to come here? I’ve half a mind to belt you home again to your mother”; and I walked towards him.