ub.'

Dick looked anxiously at his mate. There was an immediate danger that the
outlaws might be starved out.

'Parrot's goin' to fetch some,' he said brightly.

Parrot promised to do his best for them, but, although they waited till
nearly nine o'clock in hungry anticipation, he did not return that night.
The last carrot was eaten, and a cautious excursion to Summers' orchard
produced nothing, Maori's warning bark driving the boys back to the Gaol
Quarry, empty and disconsolate. Billy could hold out no longer, but he
did not meditate an open desertion.

'I'll jes' sneak round our house till I get a chance to slip in an' shake
a junk o' bread or somethin'; then I'll come right back an' we'll go
halves,' he said.

'Sure you'll come back, are you?'

''S that wet? 'S that dry?'

Dick accepted the oath. He would have gone home himself with burglarious
intentions, but feared that the official anxiety to catch the notorious
head of the new gang must have concentrated police vigilance about his
mother's house, and the risk was too great.

'Hurry back ez quick's you can,' he commanded. ''N you'll have to be
slyer 'n a black snake 'r they'll nab you.'

Dick spent the first hour alone under the saplings in the quarry, and
then, as Billy had not returned and the time hung heavily on his hands,
he crept out and up the hill towards the Red Hand. He prowled about
amongst the old tips for a time, then seated himself at the foot of a
dead butt and gave himself up to thought. He began to fear that Peterson
would prove unfaithful, or, worse still, that he had fallen into the
hands of the enemy; and the idea made him very uneasy. He hesitated about
returning to the drive.

Although he was singularly free from the superstitious fears that would
make such a place a haunt of horrors to the average youngster, the notion
of sleeping alone below there did not please him, and he had still some
hope of hearing Billy's signal.

He was beginning to feel the pangs of hunger, too, and now that it was
too late recollected that he might have found a ministering angel in Miss
Chris. It would have been an easy matter to have met her when coming
through the paddock from chapel at nine o'clock, and an easier matter to
have appealed to her tender sympathies with a story of hunger and
misfortune. The boy's thoughts lingered with Miss Chris; he found a
melancholy satisfaction in the belief that she would pity him, and
probably shed a few tears o