ain.

One cage-load after another went down, and still Dick waited. At last
there came a wild, unusual beat of the knocker. The boy knew the signal
and started up on his knees. A man rushed past the end of the stacks to
knock up Manager Holden. Others gathered excitedly about the mouth of the
shaft, and the long flat ropes spinning over the pulleys travelled at top
speed.

Soon Harry was brought to the surface, and placed upon a hurdle, and four
men carried him away across the paddocks towards Waddy. Dick followed at
a safe distance. Locky McRae, the boss of the shift, had run on ahead,
probably to warn Mrs. Hardy.

The boy saw Harry carried to his mother's house, saw a man hurry by to
call Mrs. Haddon, and waited for some time after she arrived, hidden in a
gutter near at hand, listening for every word. After about a quarter of
an hour Pete Holden drove his trap to the door, and Dick heard them
talking of the hospital and Yarraman; then he knew that Harry was not
dead, and dragged his worn, aching limbs to his own home, stupefied with
suffering, hunger, and fatigue.

When Mrs. Haddon entered her kitchen an hour later, carrying a flaming
match in her fingers, she was shocked to see a small, yellow-clad figure
crouched in her own particular armchair near the chimney, and surmounting
it a small white face in which burned two astonishing eyes. The little
widow screamed and dropped the light and then screamed again, but a
feeble voice reassured her.

'Richard Haddon, is that you?' she said severely. 'Oh! you wicked, bad,
vicious boy! Where have you been? What've you been doing?'

She was busying herself preparing the lamp, and her tongue ran on.

'You're breakin' your poor mother's heart--breakin' my heart with your
bushrangin' an' villainy, bringin' down the police, an' trouble, an'
sorrow on me.'

The little woman's nerves had been sorely tried of late with her own
troubles and her neighbours', and she broke down now and wept.

'An' you don't care,' she sobbed, 'you don't care a bit how I suffer!

Now the lamp was lit, and the widow turned her streaming eyes upon her
incorrigible young son, and instantly her whole expression changed. She
forgot to weep, she ceased to complain; she gazed at Dick and her bosom
was charged with terror, pity, and remorse. Truly he was a pitiful and
ghostly object, sitting there in his mud, looking very small and pinched,
with unaccustomed hollows in his pale cheeks, and here and th