hat happened?"

"We overtook the Church militant here on earth," rejoined the
bushranger, with rueful irreverence.

"Well, you ran against a snag that time, Mr. Sanguinary Stingaree!"

"I couldn't resist turning Howie into the Bishop and making myself his
mouthpiece. I daren't let him open his lips! It wasn't the offertory
that was worth having; it was the fun of rounding up that congregation
on the homestead veranda, and never letting them spot a thing till we'd
showed our guns. There hadn't been a hitch, and never would have been if
that old Bishop hadn't run all those miles barefoot over hot sand and
taken us unawares."

Made with wry humor and a philosophic candor, alike germane to his
predicament, these remarks seemed natural enough to one knowing little
of Stingaree. They seemed just the sort of things that Stingaree would
say. The effect, however, was rather to glorify Bishop Methuen at the
expense of Superintendent Cairns, who strove to reverse it with some
dexterity.

"You certainly ran against a snag," he repeated, "and now your mate's
run against another." He gave the butt of his ready pistol a significant
tap. "But I'm the worst snag that ever either of you struck," he went on
in his vainglory. "Make no mistake about that. And the worst day's work
that ever you did in your life, Mr. Sanguinary Stingaree, was when you
dared to play at being little crooked Cairns."

Stingaree took a first good look at his man. After all he was not so
crooked on horseback as he had seemed on foot at dusk in the Victorian
bush; his hump was even less pronounced than Stingaree himself had made
it on Rosanna; it looked more like a ridge of extra muscle across a pair
of abnormally broad and powerful shoulders. There was the absence of
neck which this deformity suggests; there was a great head lighted by
flashing and indignant eyes, but mounted only on its mighty chin. The
bushranger was conceited enough to find in the flesh a coarser and more
common type than that created by himself for the honor of the road. But
this did not make the real Superintendent a less formidable foe.

"The most poetic justice!" murmured Stingaree, and resumed in an instant
his apathetic pose.

"It serves you jolly well right, if that's what you mean," the
Superintendent snarled. "You've yourself and your own mighty cheek to
thank for taking me out of my shell and putting me on your tracks in
earnest. But it was high time they knew the cut of my j