ready for them--a charming house covered with creepers,
and backed by huts, sheep-yards, and all the usual concomitants of a
flourishing Australian sheep-station. This is Toonarbin, where Mary
Hawker is living with her son Charles as happy and uninteresting an
existence as ever fell to the lot of a handsome woman yet. The old dark
days seem like a bad dream. She had heard of her husband's re-conviction
and life sentence--finally death, and George Hawker is as one who has
never lived.

So sixteen years rolled peacefully away, until Tom Troubridge returned
from a journey up country with news of a great gang of bushrangers being
"out." He had actually sat hob-nob with the captain in a public house,
without knowing it. But his servant, William Lee, an ex-convict, knew
him, and told them that the great Captain Tonan, with whose crimes the
whole country was ringing, was George Hawker himself. Mary's terrible
fear that father and son might meet made her ill and delirious for
weeks; Tom and his trusty servant kept watch, then heard from a passing
cattle-dealer that the gang had been "utterly obliterated" by Captain
Desborough, the chief of police--but the captain had escaped.

Things went on quietly for two months, and no one thought about
bushrangers--but Mary, at her watch up at the lonely forest station--
till one morning Lee's body was found dead in his hut, with a pistol
lying near with "G. Hawker" scratched upon it. A messenger was sent post
haste to fetch Desborough and his troopers, who came, declared the
country in a state of siege, and kept us all staying at Major Buckley's.

We were sitting merrily over our wine one day, when hasty steps came
through the house. The bushrangers had attacked a station not far off,
killed the owner, and were now riding towards Captain Brentford's, the
major's nearest neighbour and old friend. Captain Desborough rose with
deadly wrath in his face. The laughing Irishman was gone, and a stern,
gloomy man stood in his place. But the villains had done their work of
destruction before we reached Garoopm, and gone off to the mountains.

"We shall have them in the morning," said Desborough. "More particularly
as they have in their drunken madness hampered themselves in the
mountains."

We started before daybreak; each man of us armed with swords and
pistols, and every man knew the use of his weapons well.

As we entered the mouth of the glen to which we were bound, one of the
most beautif