removed all the blood
articles, and they lay in a heap on the floor. These Mrs. Kyley would
have gathered up, but the girl interfered.

'No, no,' she said, 'leave it to me--leave it all to me! I must work--I
must be busy! If I stopped now my heart would break. Look at him!'

'My God! it is very like death,' whispered Mrs. Kyley.

It was not easy to get a doctor in Ballarat that day. Ben was entrusted
with the mission, and warned to proceed cautiously. He found the doctors
in urgent demand. There were wounded men hidden away in many places, and
the authorities had obtained a monopoly of the services of the practising
physicians. At ten o'clock that night Ben led a young Scotchman named
Clusky in triumph to the tent. Clusky had qualified but gold on the
rushes had proved more attractive than the wearisome hunt for fees in a
Scottish villages and on Ballarat Dr. Clusky was a working miner.

'He's the third to-day,' Clusky said to Mary, 'and the worst--by far the
worst. No fool did that, though,' he continued, referring to the
bandaging of the shoulder, as he rapidly removed the linen. 'The damage
is not so very great here, after all,' he said a moment later; 'but
there's no blood to spare left in his veins, poor devil!'

The doctor refused to interfere with Ryder's stitching in the scalp
wound, and gave a long prescription and much advice, and Jim was left to
the tender mercies of Aurora, Mary, and Ben. Ryder called every night for
a week, and then, having received a favourable verdict from the doctor,
disappeared, his disappearance being satisfactorily accounted for by the
earnest inquiries of a police officer who called upon Ben a few days
later. Meantime, Harry Peetree, who had remained in Ballarat to try and
discover the whereabouts of Jim and Mike, hunted the Kyleys out, and
learned the truth. He left a message for Jim, and then followed his
father and brother, who had made for Simpson's Ranges again immediately
after their escape from the stockade. But ere this, and long before Jim
Done was again conscious of the world about him, poor Mike Burton had
been buried with the rest of the slain insurgents in a common grave.

Fever supervened on Jim Done's injuries, and December passed as he lay
helpless in Mary Kyley's tent, babbling of Chisley, of life on the
Francis Cadman, and of Diamond Gully and Boobyalla. The injury to his
head proved the most serious wound, and there were moments when despair
filled the heart o