her in his letter that he had bought "some decent
furniture" at Port Denison, and she had smiled to herself, thinking
of what the difference would be between her ideas and his of what was
"decent furniture." And her heart had gone out to him when she--then
knowing what she had not dreamt of before, that he was a ruined man--saw
what he had bought for her out of his slender purse.

"Tom," she had cried, "why did you go to such expense? And that piano
too! I shall hardly have the heart to play upon it, knowing what----"

"You are going to play to-night after dinner. That piano will become
famous. It is the first thing of the kind ever seen on Cape York
Peninsula. You should have seen the skipper of the pearling lugger
at Somerset stare when he saw the thing swing out of the hold of the
_Gambier_. It will be a great thing for you and Mary."

"Indeed it will, Tom. For her sake alone I must rejoice."

Four months after his return to the station Gerrard was delighted to
receive a visit from Douglas Fraser and Kate. They, with Sam Young,
and the rest of Fraser's old hands, were on one of the new rushes about
ninety miles from Ocho Rios, and were, Fraser said, doing very well,
together with some fifty other white diggers, and several hundreds of
Chinese. Amongst other news the ex-judge told Gerrard something that had
pleased him greatly.

"You'll be glad to hear that Adlam is thoroughly recovered," he said, "I
saw a paragraph about him in a Brisbane _Courier_, two months old, which
the new sub-Inspector of Black Police gave me last week. The poor fellow
had a most marvellous escape."

Adlam had indeed had a marvellous escape from a dreadful death. When the
treacherous "Snaky" Swires had heard the pop of the soda water in the
purser's cabin, he had naturally concluded that Adlam had poured it into
the glass containing the drugged brandy; but as a matter of fact Adlam
had drunk the soda water alone, for he thought he had taken quite
enough champagne--and other liquid refreshment as well--at the dinner to
MacAlister, and wanted to rise earlier than usual in the morning with a
clear head. When Pinkerton and Capel entered his cabin, he was not quite
asleep, and had turned in his berth as he heard his door close softly,
and the next instant the American had seized him by the throat, and
the Jew dealt him a blow on the temple with a slung shot. After that
he remembered nothing more. When Capel and Pinkerton dropped his
unconsci