He lifts up the dead face and wipes the blood from the lips so careful; talks to it in his own language (or leastways his mother’s) like a woman over a child. Then he sobbed and groaned and shook all over as if the very life was going out of him. At last he lays the head very soft and gentle down on the ground and looks round. Sir Ferdinand gives him his handkerchief, and he lays it over the face. Then he turns away from the men that stood round, and got up looking that despairing and wretched that I couldn’t help pitying him, though he was the cause of the whole thing as far as we could see.

Sudden as a flash of powder he pulls out a small revolver—a Derringer—Starlight gave him once, and holds it out to me, butt-end first.

“You shoot me, Dick Marston; you shoot me quick,” he says. “It’s all my fault. I killed him—I killed the Captain. I want to die and go with him to the never-never country parson tell us about—up there!”

One of the troopers knocked his hand up. Sir Ferdinand gave a nod, and a pair of handcuffs were slipped over his wrists.

“You told the police the way I went?” says I. “It’s all come out of that.”

“Thought they’d grab you at Willaroon,” says he, looking at me quite sorrowful with his dark eyes, like a child. “If you hadn’t knocked me down that last time, Dick Marston, I’d never have done nothing to you nor Jim. I forgot about the old down. That brought it all back again. I couldn’t help it, and when I see Jimmy Wardell I thought they’d catch you and no one else.”

“Well, you’ve made a clean sweep of the lot of us, Warrigal,” says I, “poor Jim and all. Don’t you ever show yourself to the old man or go back to the Hollow, if you get out of this.”

“He’s dead now. I’ll never hear him speak again,” says he, looking over to the figure on the grass. “What’s the odds about me?”

I didn’t hear any more; I must have fainted away again. Things came into my head about being taken in a cart back to Cunnamulla, with Jim lying dead on one side of me and Starlight on the other. I was only half-sensible, I expect. Sometimes I thought we were alive, and another time that the three of us were dead and going to be buried.

What makes it worse I’ve seen that sight so often since—the fight on the plain and the end of it all. Just like a picture it comes baek to me over and over again, sometimes in broad day, as I sit in my cell, in the darkest midnight, in the early dawn.