he
station as soon as they'd run up the horse he left behind him at the
pub. I wondered what had brought him, if he was so set on getting back
to the old country."

"I could tell you," said Hardcastle, after some little hesitation, "and
I may as well. Poor old Duncan was the most generous of men, and nothing
would serve him but that every soul on Rosanna should share more or less
in his good fortune. I am ashamed to tell you how much he spoke of
pressing on myself. You have probably heard that one of his
peculiarities was that he would never take payment by check, like other
people? I believe it was because he had knocked down too many checks in
his day. In any case, we used to call him Hard Cash Duncan on Rosanna;
and I am very much afraid that when you saw him he must have had the
whole of his thirty thousand pounds upon him in the hardest form of
cash."

"But what has happened, Mr. Hardcastle?"

"The very worst," said Hardcastle, stooping to sip. The three heads came
closer together across the faded tablecloth. "There was no sign of him
at seven; he ought to have been with us before six. We had done our best
to make it an occasion, and it seemed that the dinner would be spoilt.
So at seven young Evans, my store-keeper, went off at a gallop to meet
him, and at twenty-five past he came galloping back leading a riderless
horse. It was the one you saw Duncan riding this afternoon. There was
blood upon the saddle. I found it. And within another hour we had found
the poor old boy himself, dead and cold in the middle of the track, with
a bullet through his heart."

The squatter's voice trembled with an emotion that did him honor in his
hearers' eyes; and the gray-bearded sergeant waited a little before
asking questions.

"What makes you think it is Stingaree?" he inquired, at length.

"I tell you I saw him on the run, with my own eyes, this morning. I
passed him in one of my paddocks, as close as I am to you, and asked him
if he was looking for the homestead. He answered that he was only riding
through, and we neither of us stopped."

"Yet you knew all the time that it was Stingaree?"

"No; to be quite honest," replied Hardcastle, "I never dreamt of it at
the time. But now I am quite positive on the point. He hadn't his
eye-glass in his eye, but it was dangling on its cord all right; and
there was the curled mustache, and the boots and breeches that one knows
all about, if one has never seen them for oneself. Yet