he never will!"

He had backed his horse while he spoke; he turned a little to the light,
and the eye-glass gleamed in his eye.

The young constable sprang forward.

"Stingaree!" he screamed.

But the gray sergeant flung his arms round their prisoner.

[Illustration: The gray sergeant flung his arms round their prisoner.]

"That's right!" cried the bushranger, as he trotted off. "Your horses
and even your pistols are out of reach, thanks to a discipline for
which I love you dearly. You hang on to your bird in the hand, my
friends, and never again misjudge the one in the bush!"

And as the trees swallowed the cantering horse and man, followed by a
futile shot from the first revolver which the young constable had picked
up, an embittered admiration kindled in the captive murderer's eyes.

The Purification of Mulfera

Mulfera Station, N.S.W., was not only an uttermost end of the earth, but
an exceedingly loose end, and that again in more senses than one. There
were no ladies on Mulfera, and this wrought inevitable deterioration in
the young men who made a bachelors' barracks of the homestead. Not that
they ever turned it into the perfect pandemonium you might suppose; but
it was unnecessary either to wear a collar or to repress an oath at
table; and this sort of disregard does not usually stop at the
elementary decencies. It is true that on Mulfera the bark of the
bachelor was something worse than his bite, and his tongue no fair
criterion to the rest of him. Nevertheless, the place became a byword,
even in the back-blocks; and when at last the good Bishop Methuen had
the hardihood to include it in an episcopal itinerary, there were
admirers of that dear divine who roundly condemned his folly, and
enemies who no longer denied his heroism.

The Lord Bishop of the Back-Blocks had at that time been a twelvemonth
or more in charge of what he himself described playfully as his
"oceanic see"; but his long neglect of Mulfera was due less to its
remoteness than to the notorious fact that they wanted no adjectival and
alliterative bishops there. An obvious way of repulse happened to be
open to the blaspheming squatter, though there is no other instance of
its employment. On these up-country visitations the Bishop was dependent
for his mobility upon the horseflesh of his hospitable hosts; thus it
became the custom to send to fetch him from one station to another; and
as a rule the owner or the manager came himself