nd had lain in wait. They gathered about Dick, whose forehead
was most picturesquely bedabbled with blood.

'Crikey! Dick,' cried the wondering Jacker, 'did he hammer you much?'

'Feel,' said Dick, guiding one hand after another to a lump on his head
that increased his height by quite an inch.

'Great Gosh!' murmured Peterson; 'ain't he a one-er? The beggar must 'a'
tried to murder you.'

Dick nodded.

'Yes,' he said; 'but 'twasn't Hamlet.'

'Go on!' The boys looked back apprehensively.

'No, 'twasn't. 'Twas a big feller. I dunno who; but he must 'a' bin a
bushranger, 'r a feller what's escaped from gaol, 'r someone. Did you
coves see which way he went?'

'No,' said Ted fearfully; and a simultaneous move was made towards the
township. The boys were not cowards, but they had plenty of discretion.

'Look here,' Dick continued impressively; 'no matter who 'twas, we've
gotter keep dark, see. If we don't it'll be found out what we was all up
to, an' we'll get more whack-o.'

The party was unanimous on this point; and when Dick returned home he
shocked his mother with a lively account of how he slipped in the quarry
and fell a great depth, striking his head on a rock, and being saved from
death only by the merest chance imaginable.

CHAPTER VII.

The small, wooden Wesleyan chapel at Waddy was perched on an eminence at
the end of the township furthest from the Drovers' Arms. The chapel,
according to the view of the zealous brethren who conducted it,
represented all that counted for righteousness in the township, and the
Drovers' Arms the head centre of the powers of evil. For verbal
convenience in prayer and praise the hotel was known as 'The Sink of
Iniquity,' and the chapel as 'This Little Corner of the Vineyard,' and
through the front windows of the latter, one sabbath morn after another
for many years, lusty Cornishmen, moved by the spirit, had hurled down
upon McMahon and his house strident and terrible denunciations.

Materially the chapel had nothing in common with a vineyard; it was built
upon arid land as bare and barren as a rock; not even a blade of grass
grew within a hundred yards of its doors. The grim plainness of the old
drab building was relieved only by a rickety bell-tower so stuffed with
sparrows' nests that the bell within gave forth only a dull and muffled
note. The chapel was surrounded with the framework of a fence only, so
the chapel ground was the chief rendezvous of all the goats of Wa