dle, should contribute greatly to the
verisimilitude. Dare I hope that you begin to appreciate some of the
points of my performance so far as it has gone? The pretext on which I
bared my foot for its delicate job under your very eyes, eh? Not so vain
as it looked, in either sense, I fancy! Should you have said that your
hand would recoil from a revolver the moment it went off? You see, I
staked my life on it, and I've won. And what about that fall? It was the
lottery! I was prepared to have my head cracked like an egg, and it's
still pretty sore. The broken wrist wasn't your fault; it had passed
into the accepted situation before you turned up. And you would
certainly have seen that I was shamming sleep if we hadn't both been so
genuinely sleepy at the time. I give you my word, I very nearly threw
up the whole thing for forty winks! Any other point on which you could
wish enlightenment? Then let me thank you with all my heart for one of
the worst days, and some of the greatest moments, in my whole career."

But the crooked man answered never a word, as he sat in a ball with
uplifted palms, and glaring, upturned, unconquerable eyes.

"Good-by, Mr. Superintendent Cairns," said Stingaree. "I'm afraid I've
been rather cruel to you--but you were never very nice to me!"

Sergeant Cameron was driving the spring-cart, toward sundown, after a
variety of unforeseen delays. Of a sudden out of the pink haze came a
galloping figure, slightly humped, in the inspector's coat and
wideawake, with a bare foot through one stirrup and only a sock on its
fellow.

"Where's Stingaree?" screamed the sergeant, pulling up. And the galloper
drew rein at the driven horse's head.

"Dead!" said he, thickly. "He was worse than we thought. You fetch him
while I----"

But this time the sergeant knew that voice too well, and his right hand
had flown to the back of his belt. Stingaree's shot was only first by a
fraction of a second, but it put a bullet through the brain of the horse
between the shafts, so that horse and shafts came down together, and the
sergeant fired into the earth as he fell across the splashboard.

Stingaree pressed soft heels into the thoroughbred's ribs and thundered
on and on. Soon there was a gate to open, and when he listened at that
gate all was still behind him and before; but far ahead the rolling
plain was faintly luminous in the dusk, and as this deepened into night
a cluster of terrestrial lights sprang out with t