revolver, and deliberately fired. The aim was too
true: the trooper fell dead, shot right through the heart. Brooke
turned to fly immediately he had fired his shot, but the root of a
tree behind him tripped him up, and the little man who followed close
behind the trooper was upon him in an instant, with his knee upon his
body holding him down. Brooke managed to turn himself half round,
presented his revolver at his captor, and fired. The cap snapped on
the nipple! My friend says he will never forget the look the wretch
gave him when his pistol missed fire. A few minutes--long, long
minutes--passed, and at length help arrived and the murderer was
secured. The number shortly increased to a crowd of angry diggers. At
first they wished to hang Brooke at once upon the nearest tree; but
moderate counsels prevailed, and at last they agreed to take him into
Havelock and send for a doctor.

When the crowd got back to Havelock their fury broke out. They
determined to level the thieves' tents and the grog-shanties that had
harboured them. What a wild scene it must have been! Two or three
thousand men pulling down huts and tents, smashing crockery and
furniture, ripping up beds, and levelling the roosts of infamy to the
ground. When Dr. Laidman, the doctor sent for from Maryborough,
arrived to attend the dying man, he saw a cloud of "white things" in
the air, and could not make out what they were. They turned out to be
the feathers of the numerous feather-beds, which the diggers had torn
to pieces, that were flying about. The diggers' blood was fairly up,
and they were determined to make "a clean job of it" before they had
done. And not only did they thoroughly root out and destroy all the
thieves' dens and low grog-shops and places of ill-fame, but they
literally hunted the owners and occupants of them right out into the
bush.

I must now tell you of the murderer's end. He was taken to the rude
theatre of the place, and laid down upon the stage, with his two
victims beside him--the dead Lopez on one side and the dead trooper on
the other. When the doctor arrived, he examined Brooke, and told him
he would try to keep him alive, so that justice might be done. And the
doctor did his best. But the Spaniard's wound had been terrible and
deadly. Brooke died in about half an hour from the time of the
doctor's arrival The murderer remained impenitent to the last, and
opened his mouth only once to utter an oath. Such was the horrible
e