Well, as I was sayin’, we don’t have it in for the regulars in the police; it’s all fair pulling, “pull devil pull baker,” someone has to get the worst of it. Now it’s us, now it’s them, that gets took or rubbed out, and no more about it.

But what us cross coves can’t stand and are mostly sure to turn nasty on is the notion of fellows going into the man-hunting trade, with us for game, either for the fun of it or for the reward. That reward means the money paid for our blood. We don’t like it. It may seem curious, but we don’t; and them as take up the line as a game to make money or fun out of, when they’ve no call to, find out their mistake, sometimes when it’s a deal too late.

Now we’d heard that a party of four men—some of them had been gaol warders and some hadn’t—had made it up to follow us up and get us one way or the other if it was to be done. They weren’t in the police, but they thought they knew quite as much as the police did; and, besides, the reward, £5,000, if they got our lot and any one of the others, was no foolish money.

Well, nothing would knock it out of these chaps’ heads but that we were safe to be grabbed in the long-run trying to make into the old home. This was what made them gammon to be surveyors when they first came, as we heard about, and go measuring and tape-lining about, when there wasn’t a child over eight years old on the whole creek that couldn’t have told with half an eye they wasn’t nothing of the sort.

Well, as bad luck would have it, just as father was getting down towards the place he meets Moran and Daly, who were making over to the Fish River on a cattle-duffing lay of their own. They were pretty hard up; and Moran after his rough and tumble with Jim, in which he had come off second best, was ready for anything—anything that was bad, that is.

After he’d a long yarn with them about cattle and horses and what not, he offered them a ten-pound note each if they’d do what he told them. Dad always carried money about with him; he said it came in handy. If the police didn’t take him, they wouldn’t get it; and if they did take him, why, nothing would matter much and it might go with the rest. It came in handy enough this time, anyhow, though it helped what had been far better left undone.