e him might only
do more harm than good, Tony let the head lie on the pillow again and
stood back. The man's chest moved as the gasping struggles for breath
sounded hard and grating in his throat, and his frame trembled as it
lay. Presently he opened his eyes again and looked at Tony.

"Tell your--mother when you--find her how----"

Another spasm interrupted him, and Tony stepped nearer, for the voice
was terribly low. When the worst of the spasm was over, he went on, the
words scarcely audible--

"How your--father--died."

The eyes, still full of hatred though they were growing lustreless and
dull, were fixed on Tony's face with a blinkless stare. The distorted
lips moved twice without any sound coming from them. Then the chin fell;
the glazing eyes turned up from their stare on Tony's face, up to the
dark starlit vault overhead; a wavering sigh came as it were on the
silent air of the night--and the unknown was dead.

For a time Tony stood looking down at him as he lay, the face, never
beautiful, growing more hideous every second with the muscles setting
rigid in the last expression of savage hate. The fire softly hissed and
crackled as the burning logs flaked into ashes, and beyond the range of
the ruddy light the bush formed a deep, impenetrable gloom, darker and
more sombre than the deep blue of the moonless sky. The faint wind of
night, scarcely perceptible to the senses save by the soft whispering
rustle of the foliage, brought no other sound with it. All was still and
silent, and Tony, as he stood, felt as a man will sometimes feel when he
stands on a silent night in the great immensity of the Australian
bush--as though he were something which had no material existence save
the consciousness of the moment, and even that were an intrusion on the
sublime calm of untrammelled, sleeping nature.

Then, as with the fury of a thunder-peal, there crashed in upon his
half-numbed mind the significance of all that he had just seen and
heard. The hate the man had shown him; the story of that ghastly
revenge; the message he had scoffingly told him to take to his
mother,--all returned to him in a moment, blended, as it were, with the
hints Nuggan had thrown out, and the suspicion that had often been in
his own mind.

The man had spoken of Ailleen; he had claimed the robbery from Leary's
hut; he had boasted how he had stolen the child from its mother and left
it at Taylor's Flat--and Nuggan had told him to ask next tim