lbow, between the back of his cage and the tent wall.
Blinking his eyes he discovered the shape of a man in the darkness. The
man held a pannikin in one hand, and was offering it through the bars.

"Here, old boy. Here old fellow," murmured the intruder, in a tone one
adopts in propitiating strange dogs.

He shook the pannikin, and the Missing Link detected the familiar flavour
of rum, good red-rum, bush rum. Nickie sniffed again, and backed away,
growling a low, guttural growl. The Missing Link had a great tenderness
for rum, the smell of it excited profound longings, but he wanted time to
deliberate. What was the game? "These fellows have heard Thunder
describing Mahdi's fondness for liquor," thought Nickie. "They want to
make him drunk, and see him play up. It's a lark. Shall I encourage them?
I can do it safely to a moderate extent. It's like flying in the face of
Providence missing drinks that are thrown at you. I'll encourage them to
the extent of one drink, anyhow. Here's luck."

The Missing Link seized that pannikin of rum, the Missing Link took a
good, long pull, and in less than half a minute was curled up on the
straw, dead to the world, a thoroughly hocussed man-monkey.

When Professor Thunder came to shake up his justly celebrated Link, he
found the cage empty, and a bar wrenched from its place in the back wall.
He drew his own conclusions--conclusions most unfavourable to Mahdi--and
used his own language. He closed his show, and went raging about Loo
township in quest of his stray freak.

Nickie the Kid awakened from a death-like sleep in the early hours of a
warm summer Sunday. Dawn steeped the bush in crimson, the smoke of a
dying camp-fire curled high in the air and its top most spiral caught the
red glow of the young sun. About that camp-fire, twisted on their rugs
and blankets on the grass in the quaint attitudes of out-door drunks, lay
four shearers, Bill, Mike, Ben, and Fred. Near them were scattered
various bottles, all empty.

Nickie rubbed his eyes with his hairy paw, and stared at the recumbent
figures. His head seen as capacious as an iron tank, and every inch of it
held a special and independent ache. The Missing Link was trying to
think.

Understanding came in a flash. He had been stolen from the show. These
rascals had given him hocussed rum, and had got him away, probably tied
to one of the horses. His aching limbs hinted at that, and he could see
the horses grazing among the trees.