alone would have landed me. I didn't even gallop away, but
just jogged off quietly in the thick dust at the side of the road
(though I own my heart was galloping), and thanked my stars the bank
was at that end of the township, in which I really hadn't set foot.
The very last thing I heard was the two managers raising Cain and the
coachman. And now, Bunny--"

He stood up and stretched himself, with a smile that ended in a yawn.
The black windows had faded through every shade of indigo; they now
framed their opposite neighbors, stark and livid in the dawn; and the
gas seemed turned to nothing in the globes.

"But that's not all?" I cried.

"I'm sorry to say it is," said Raffles apologetically. "The thing
should have ended with an exciting chase, I know, but somehow it
didn't. I suppose they thought I had got no end of a start; then they
had made up their minds that I belonged to the gang, which was not so
many miles away; and one of them had got as much as he could carry from
that gang as it was. But I wasn't to know all that, and I'm bound to
say that there was plenty of excitement left for me. Lord, how I made
that poor brute travel when I got among the trees! Though we must have
made it over fifty miles from Melbourne, we had done it at a snail's
pace; and those stolen oats had brisked the old girl up to such a pitch
that she fairly bolted when she felt her nose turned south. By Jove,
it was no joke, in and out among those trees, and under branches with
your face in the mane! I told you about the forest of dead gums? It
looked perfectly ghostly in the moonlight. And I found it as still as
I had left it--so still that I pulled up there, my first halt, and lay
with my ear to the ground for two or three minutes. But I heard
nothing--not a thing but the mare's bellow and my own heart. I'm
sorry, Bunny; but if ever you write my memoirs, you won't have any
difficulty in working up that chase. Play those dead gum-trees for all
they're worth, and let the bullets fly like hail. I'll turn round in
my saddle to see Ewbank coming up hell-to-leather in his white suit,
and I'll duly paint it red. Do it in the third person, and they won't
know how it's going to end."

"But I don't know myself," I complained. "Did the mare carry you all
the way back to Melbourne?"

"Every rod, pole or perch! I had her well seen to at our hotel, and
returned her to the doctor in the evening. He was tremendously tickled
to hear tha