of our way to save your life. It never struck me that you might go
out of your way to take ours!"

Stingaree paused, smoking his pipe.

"But it did me!" cried Howie.

"I never meant taking your lives," muttered Vanheimert. "I meant taking
you--as you deserved."

"We scarcely deserved it of you; but that is a matter of opinion. As for
taking us alive, no doubt you would have preferred to do so if it had
seemed equally safe and easy; you had not the pluck to run a single
risk. You were given every chance. I sent Howie into the scrub, took the
powder out of six cartridges, and put what anybody would have taken for
a loaded revolver all but into your hands. I sat at your mercy, quite
looking forward to the sensation of being stuck up for a change. If you
had stuck me up like a man," said Stingaree, reflectively examining his
pipe, "you might have lived to tell the tale."

There was an interval of the faint, persistent rustling of branch and
leaf, varied by the screech of a distant cockatoo and the nearer cry of
a crow, as the dusk deepened into night as expeditiously as on the
stage. Vanheimert was not awed by the quiet voice to which he had been
listening. It lacked the note of violence which he understood; it even
lulled him into a belief that he would still live to tell the tale. But
in the dying light he looked up, and in the fierce unrelenting face,
made the more sinister by its foppish furniture, he read his doom.

"You tried to shoot me in my sleep," said Stingaree, speaking slowly,
with intense articulation. "That's your gratitude! You will live just
long enough to wish that you had shot yourself instead!"

Stingaree rose.

"You may as well shoot me now!" cried Vanheimert, with a husky effort.

"Shoot you? I'm not going to _shoot_ you at all; shooting's too good for
scum like you. But you are to die--make no mistake about that. And soon;
but not to-night. That would not be fair on you, for reasons which I
leave to your imagination. You will lie where you are to-night; and you
will be watched and fed like your superiors in the condemned cell. The
only difference is that I can't tell you when it will be. It might be
to-morrow--I don't think it will--but you may number your days on the
fingers of both hands."

So saying, Stingaree turned on his heel, and was lost to sight in the
shades of evening before he reached his tent. But Howie remained on duty
with the condemned man.

As such Vanheimert was treated