ight, but bingie mine feel sick.{*} Get water for
me, Tommy."

* "I feel faint"

The black boy ran down to the waterhole, filled his cabbage-tree hat
with water, and Gerrard drank.

"Go and see if those two men are dead, Tommy, If they are not, take
their pistols away. Then make a big fire, and I will come and look at
them."

"All right, boss, but by and by." He raised and assisted Gerrard into
the cave, laid him down upon his blanket, and placed his head upon one
of the bullet-riddled saddles, re-lit the extinguished fire, took off
his shirt, tore off the back, and bandaged his master's thigh with it.

"You like smoke now, boss?" "Yes, fill my pipe before you go." Five
minutes later Tommy returned. "All three fellow dead," he observed
placidly, as he stooped down to the fire and lit his own pipe with a
burning coal. "Big man me shoot got him bullet through chest; little
man with black beard and nose like cockatoo you shoot, got him bullet
through chest too, close up longa troat."

Then he asked if he might go after the two horses, which, hobbled as
they were, had gone off at the first sound of the firing, and were
perhaps many miles away.

"All right, Tommy. We must not let them get too far away."

The black boy grunted an assent, made the fire blaze up, and taking up
his own and Gerrard's bridles, disappeared.

In less than half an hour he returned, riding one horse and leading the
other, and found that Gerrard had risen and was looking at the bodies of
the three men, which lay stark and stiff under the now bright starlight.
Tommy's face wore an expression of supreme satisfaction as he jumped off
his horse.

"Other fellow man bung{*} too," he said in a complacent tone.

* Bung---dead.

"Did you shoot him?" cried Gerrard, aghast at more bloodshed.

"Baal me shoot him, boss. I find him longa place where all four fellow
been camp in little gully. He been try to put saddle on horse, but fall
down and die--_boigan_ been bite him I think it, when he swim across
waterhole."

"Come and show me," said Gerrard, and, suffering as he was, he mounted
his horse, and followed Tommy. In a few minutes they came to the place
where Forreste and his gang had hidden their horses, all of which were
tethered.

Lying doubled up on the ground beside a saddle, was the body of Cheyne.
He had succeeded in putting the bridle on his horse, and then had
evidently fallen ere he could place the saddle on the animal.

G