though he had
been forced to leave the university, and, as report went, England too,
for some great irregularity.

He had money, and a share in his brother-in-law's station, although he
never stayed there many months in the year. He was always away at some
mischief or another. No horse-race or prize-fight could go on without
him, and he himself never left one of these last-mentioned gatherings
without finding some one to try conclusions with him. Beside this, he
was a great writer and singer of comic songs, and a consummate horseman.

One fine day he came back to his brother's station in serious trouble.
Whether he had mistaken another man's horse for his own or not, I
cannot say; but, at all events, he announced that a warrant was out
against him for horse-stealing, and that he must go into hiding. So he
took up his quarters at a little hut of his brother-in-law's, on the
ranges, inhabited only by a stockkeeper and a black boy, and kept a
young lubra in pay to watch down the glen for the police.

One morning she came running into the hut, breathless, to say that a
lieutenant and three troopers were riding towards the hut. Jack had
just time to saddle and mount his horse before the police caught sight
of him, and started after him at full speed.

They hunted him into a narrow glen; a single cattletrack, not a foot
broad, led on between a swollen rocky creek, utterly impassable by
horse or man, and a lofty precipice of loose broken slate, on which one
would have thought a goat could not have found a footing. The young
police lieutenant had done his work well, and sent a trooper round to
head him, so that Jack found himself between the devil and the deep
sea. A tall armed trooper stood in front of him, behind was the
lieutenant, on the right of the creek, and on the left the precipice.

They called out to him to surrender; but, giving one look before and
behind, and seeing escape was hopeless, he hesitated not a moment, but
put his horse at the cliff, and clambered up, rolling down tons of
loose slate in his course. The lieutenant shut his eyes, expecting to
see horse and man roll down into the creek, and only opened them in
time to see Jack stand for a moment on the summit against the sky, and
then disappear.

He disappeared over the top of the cliff, and so he was lost to the ken
of white men for the space of four years. His sister and brother-in-law
mourned for him as dead, and mourned sincerely, for they and all