sured.
There were clouds aplenty in the sky, light clouds looking as if they
had been trailed through red ink, but there was nothing about them to
suggest that a storm was brewing, or that even the slightest change in
the weather could be expected. Nevertheless the air contained a hint of
evil, so much so that an imaginative person would have peopled the hills
with gnomes and the woods with devils. Even had fairies existed in the
glades, one would have instinctively known them to be bad fairies. Yet
one could not say offhand whence or from whom the evil that was to be,
would originate; all earth and sky seemed somehow to be in the dread
conspiracy.

The lurid hues of the sunset flared and faded into the drabber colors of
twilight, the shadows swept down in phalanxes from the hills, and the
still lifeless trees, stirring in the evening breeze, became black
mocking shapes of infamy. The yellow disc of a moon, climbing up over
the woods, took on the semblance of the leering face of a drunken man.

The two men who presently came riding along through the tangled
fastnesses of what a couple of score years or more ago were the
untenanted and, to a great extent, the unexplored depths of a Victorian
forest, were very evidently unaffected by the grim fancies of the
evening. They were not laughing certainly, and when they spoke it was in
whispers, but the younger man hummed a music-hall tune under his breath.
There was something rakish, not to say reckless, in the way the elder
sat his mount. They went carefully, though, taking every possible
precaution against making needless noise. Once the horse of the elder
man stumbled and set a stone rolling down a declivity. Both men reined
in instantly and listened until the echoes died away in the distance.

"You're as nervous as a rabbit, Jack," the younger man remarked when
presently they resumed their journey. "Every little sound seems to
startle you."

"There's no sense in taking chances, man," said the one called Jack.

"If it comes to that there's no chances to take."

"Only that of being caught and hanged, Abel."

"There's not much hope of that," Abel Cumshaw replied. "Gentry like
ourselves are rather out of fashion now since they've squashed the
Kellys. The country's quietened down a lot, and a 'ranger's supposed to
be a thing of the past. As it is, there's never been bushrangers in this
part of the State, and what hasn't been is the least likely to happen in
most people's