, he
slept. And when the sixth cap snapped as harmlessly as the other five,
Vanheimert caught the revolver by its barrel to throw or to strike. But
the raised arm was seized from behind by Howie, who had crept from the
scrub at the snapping of the first cap; at the same moment Stingaree
sprang upon him; and in less than a minute Vanheimert lay powerless,
grinding his teeth, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, and filling the
air with nameless imprecations.

The bushrangers let him curse; not a word did they bandy with him or
with each other. Their action was silent, swift, concerted, prearranged.
They lashed their prisoner's wrists together, lashed his elbows to his
ribs, hobbled his ankles, and tethered him to a tree by the longest and
the stoutest of their many ropes. The tree was the one under which
Vanheimert had found himself the day before; in the afternoon it was
exposed to the full fury of the sun; and in the sun they left him,
quieter already, but not so quiet as they. It was near sundown when they
returned to look upon a broken man, crouching in his toils like a beaten
beast, with undying malice in his swollen eyes. Stingaree sat at his
prisoner's feet, offered him tobacco without a sneer, and lit up his own
when the offer was declined with a curse.

"When we came upon you yesterday morning in the storm, one of us was for
leaving you to die in your tracks," began Stingaree. He was immediately
interrupted by his mate.

"That was me!" cried Howie, with a savage satisfaction.

"It doesn't matter which of us it was," continued Stingaree; "the other
talked him over; we put you on one of our horses, and we brought you
more dead than alive to the place which no other man has seen since we
took a fancy to it. We saved your miserable life, I won't say at the
risk of our own, but at risk enough even if you had not recognized us.
We were going to see you through, whether you knew us or not; before
this we should have set you on the road from which you had strayed. I
thought you must know us by sight, but when you denied it I saw no
reason to disbelieve you. It only dawned on me by degrees that you were
lying, though Howie here was sure of it.

"I still couldn't make out your game; if it was funk I could have
understood it; so I tried to get you to own up in the night. I let you
see that we didn't mind whether you knew us or not, and yet you
persisted in your lie. So then I smelt something deeper. But we had gone
out