s and a pistol or two, could have shot down a small
regiment as they came down one at a time.

We stayed in there by the track, and after about half-an-hour we heard
the two horses coming down slowly, step by step, kicking the stones down
before them. Then we could hear a man groaning, as if he couldn't bear
the pain, and partly as if he was trying to smother it. Then another
man's voice, very soft and soothing like, trying to comfort another.

'My head's a-fire, and these cursed ribs are grinding against one
another every step of this infernal ladder. Is it far now?' How he
groaned then!

'Just got the bottom; hold on a bit longer and you'll be all right.'

Just then the leading horse came out into the open before the cave. We
had a good look at him and his rider. I never forgot them. It was a bad
day I ever saw either, and many a man had cause to say the same.

The horse held up his head and snorted as he came abreast of us, and
we showed out. He was one of the grandest animals I'd ever seen, and
I afterwards found he was better than he looked. He came stepping down
that beastly rocky goat-track, he, a clean thoroughbred that ought never
to have trod upon anything rougher than a rolled training track, or
the sound bush turf. And here he was with a heavy weight on his back--a
half-dead, fainting man, that couldn't hold the reins--and him walking
down as steady as an old mountain bull or a wallaroo on the side of a
creek bank.

I hadn't much time to look him over. I was too much taken up with the
rider, who was lying forward on his chest across a coat rolled round and
strapped in front of the saddle, and his arms round the horse's neck. He
was as pale as a ghost. His eyes--great dark ones they were, too--were
staring out of his head. I thought he was dead, and called out to father
and Jim that he was.

They ran up, and we lifted him off after undoing some straps and a rope.
He was tied on (that was what the half-caste was waiting for at the top
of the gully). When we laid him down his head fell back, and he looked
as much like a corpse as if he had been dead a day.

Then we saw he had been wounded. There was blood on his shirt, and the
upper part of his arm was bandaged.

'It's too late, father,' said I; 'he's a dead man. What pluck he must
have had to ride down there!'

'He's worth two dead 'uns yet,' said father, who had his hand on his
pulse. 'Hold his head up one of you while I go for the brandy. How did