“If he don’t somebody else will; but why do you pitch upon him? You don’t like him somehow; I don’t see that he’s worse than any other. Besides, we haven’t done anything much to have a reward put on us.”

“No! that’s to come,” answered Jim, very dismally for him. “I don’t see what else is to come of it. Hist! isn’t that a horse’s step coming this way? Yes, and a man on him, too.”

It was a bright night, though only the stars were out; but the weather was that clear that you could see ever so well and hear ever so far also. Jim had a blackfellow’s hearing; his eyes were like a hawk’s; he could see in about any light, and read tracks like a printed book.

I could hear nothing at first; then I heard a slight noise a good way off, and a stick breaking every now and then.

“Talk of the devill” growled Jim,“and here he comes. I believe that’s Master Warrigal, infernal scoundrel that he is. Of course he’s got a message from our respectable old dad or Starlight, asking us to put our heads in a noose for them again.”

“How do you know?”

“I know it’s that ambling horse he used to ride,” says Jim. “I can make out his sidling kind of way of using his legs. All amblers do that.”

“You’re right,” I said, after listening for a minute. “I can hear the regular pace, different from a horse’s walk.”

“How does he know we’re here, I wonder?” says Jim.

“Some of the telegraphs piped us, I suppose,” I answered. “I begin to wish they forgot us altogether.”

“No such luck,” says Jim. “Let’s keep dark and see what this black snake of a Warrigal will be up to. I don’t expect he’ll ride straight up to the door.”

He was right. The horse hoofs stopped just inside a thick bit of scrub, just outside the open ground on which the hut stood. After a few seconds we heard the cry of the mopoke. It’s not a cheerful sound at the dead of night, and now, for some reason or other, it affected Jim and me in much the same manner. I remember the last time I had heard the bird at home, just before we started over for Terrible Hollow, and it seemed unlucky. Perhaps we were both a little nervous; we hadn’t drunk anything but tea for weeks. We drank it awfully black and strong, and a great lot of it.