These careful respectable people didn’t show themselves too forward either in giving help or information to the police. Not by no means. They never encouraged them to stay when they came about the place, and weren’t that over liberal in feeding their horses, or giving them a hand in any way, that they’d come again in a hurry. If they were asked about the bush-rangers, or when they’d been last seen, they were very careful, and said as little as possible.

No one wonders at people like the Barnes’s, or little farmers, or the very small sort of settlers, people with one flock of sheep or a few cows, doing this sort of thing; they have a lot to lose and nothing to get if they gain But regular country gentlemen, with big properties, lots of money, and all the rest of it, they’re there to show a good example to the countryside, whether it paid for the time or whether it didn’t; and all us sort of chaps, on the cross or not, like them all better for it.

When I say all of us, I don’t mean Moran. A sulky, black-hearted, revengeful brute he always was—I don’t think he’d any manly feeling about him. He was a half-bred gipsy, they told us that knew where he was reared, and Starlight said gipsy blood was a queer cross, for devilry and hardness it couldn’t be beat; he didn’t wonder a bit at Moran’s being the scoundrel he was.

No doubt he “had it in” for more than one of the people who helped the police to chevy Wall and his lot about. From what I knew of him I was sure he’d do some mischief one of these days, and make all the country ten times as hot against us as they were now. He had no mercy about him. He’d rather shoot a man any day than not; and he’d burn a house down just for the pleasure of seeing how the owner looked when it was lighted.

Starlight used to say he despised men that tried to save them selves cowardly-like more than he could say, and thought them worse than the bush-rangers themselves. Some of them were big people, too.