rt was
seared once--ay, twice--and deeply, too. I have no heart now, or if I
ever feel at all it's for a horse. I wonder how old Rainbow gets on.'

'You were sorry father let us come in the first time,' I said. 'How do
you account for that, if you've no heart?'

'Really! Well, listen, Richard. Did I? If you guillotine a man--cut off
his head, as they do in France, with an axe that falls like the
monkey of a pile-driver--the limbs quiver and stretch, and move almost
naturally for a good while afterwards. I've seen the performance
more than once. So I suppose the internal arrangements immediately
surrounding my heart must have performed some kind of instinctive motion
in your case and Jim's. By the way, where the deuce has Jim been all
this time? Clever James!'

'Better ask Evans here if the police knows. It is not for want of trying
if they don't.'

'By the Lord Harry, no!' said the trooper, a young man who saw no reason
not to be sociable. 'It's the most surprisin' thing out where he's got
to. They've been all round him, reg'lar cordon-like, and he must have
disappeared into the earth or gone up in a balloon to get away.'

Chapter 19

It took us a week's travelling or more to get to Berrima. Sometimes
we were all night in the coach as well as all day. There were other
passengers in the coach with us. Two or three bushmen, a station
overseer with his wife and daughter, a Chinaman, and a lunatic that had
come from Nomah, too. I think it's rough on the public to pack madmen
and convicts in irons in the same coach with them. But it saves the
Government a good deal of money, and the people don't seem to care. They
stand it, anyhow.

We would have made a bolt of it if we'd had a chance, but we never had,
night nor day, not half a one. The police were civil, but they never
left us, and slept by us at night. That is, one watched while the
other slept. We began to sleep soundly ourselves and to have a better
appetite. Going through the fresh air had something to do with it, I
daresay. And then there was no anxiety. We had played for a big stake
and lost. Now we had to pay and make the best of it. It was the tenth
day (there were no railways then to shorten the journey) when we drove
up to the big gate and looked at the high walls and dark, heavy lines of
Berrima Gaol, the largest, the most severe, the most dreaded of all the
prisons in New South Wales. It had leaked out the day before, somehow,
that the famous