There was the whole countryside pretty thick with police stations, where every man, from the sergeant to the last-joined recruit, knew the height, size, colour of hair, and so on of every one of us. If a suspicious-looking man was seen or heard within miles the telegraph wires could be set to work. He could be met, stopped, searched, and overhauled. What chance would any of us have then?

“Don’t flatter yourselves, my boys,” Starlight said, when we’d got the length of thinking how it was to be done, “that there’s any little bit of a chance, for a year or two at any rate, of getting away. Not a kangaroo rat could hop across from one serub to another if there was the least suspicion upon him without being blocked or run into. Jim, old man, I’m sorry for you, but my belief is we’re quartered here for a year or two certain, and the sooner we make up our minds to it the better.”

Here poor old Jim groaned. “Don’t you think,” he said, quite timid-like,“that about shearing-time a man might take his chance, leading an old horse with a swag on, as if he wanted to get shearing in some of the big down-the-river sheds?”

“Not a bit of it,” says Starlight. “You’re such a good-looking, upstanding chap that you’re safe to be pulled up and made to answer for yourself before you’d get fifty miles. If you rode a good horse they’d think you were too smart-looking for a regular shearer, and nail you at once.”

“But I’d take an old screw with a big leg,” pleaded Jim. “Haven’t I often see a cove walking and leading one just to carry his blankets and things?”

“Then they’d know a chap like you, full of work and a native to boot, ought to have a better turn-out—if it wasn’t a stall. So they’d have you for that.”

“But there’s Isaac Lawson and Campbelltown. You’ve seen them. Isaac’s an inch taller than me, and the same cut and make. Why should they stop them when they’re going shearing? They’re square enough, and always was. And Campbelltown’s a good deal like Dick, beard and all.”

“Well, I’ll bet you a new meerschaum that both men are arrested on suspicion before shearing. Of course they’ll let them go again; but, you mark my words, they’ll be stopped, as well as dozens of others. That will show how close the search will be.”

“I don’t care,” says Jim, in his old, obstinate way, which he never put on except very seldom. “I’ll go in a month or two—police or no police. I’ll make for Melbourne if there was an army of soldiers between me and Jeanie.”