ght finally
prove to have been.

"Well," said Kilbride, "you have the whip-hand over me this time, and I
give you best. How long are you going to keep me on my knees?"

"You can get up when you like," replied Stingaree, "if you promise not
to play the fool. So you were really going to take me this time, were
you? I have really no desire to rub it in, but if I were you I should
have kept that to myself until I'd done it. And you wanted to have me
all to yourself? Well, you couldn't pay me a higher compliment, but I'm
going to pay you a high one in return. You really did make me run for it
last time, and leave all sorts of things behind. So this time I mean to
take them with me and leave you here instead. Nevertheless, you're the
only Victorian trap I have any respect for, Mr. Kilbride, or I shouldn't
have gone to all this trouble to get you here."

Kilbride did not blanch, but he heard his apparent doom with a
glittering eye, and was deaf for a little to _The Pirates of Penzance_.

"Oh! I'm not going to harm a good man like you," continued Stingaree,
"unless you make me. Your friend Bowen made me, but I don't promise to
fire low every time, mark you! There's another good man on the other
side--Cairns by name--you know him, do you? He'll kick up his heels
when he hears of this; but they do no better in New South Wales, so
don't you let that worry you. To think you held both shooters at one
stage of the game! I trusted you, and so you trusted me; if only you had
known, eh? Hear that tune, and know what it is? It's in your honor, Mr.
Kilbride."

And Stingaree hummed the policemen's chorus _sotto voce_; but before the
end, with a swift remorse, induced by the dignity of Kilbride's bearing
in humiliating disaster, he swooped upon the insolent instrument and
stopped its tinkle by touching the lever with one revolver-barrel while
sedulously covering the Sub-Inspector with the other. The sudden
cessation of the toy music, bringing back into undue prominence all the
little bush noises which had filled the air before, brought home to
Kilbride a position which he had subconsciously associated with those
malevolent strains as something theatrical and unreal. He had known in
his heart that it was real, without grasping the reality until now. He
flung up his fists in sudden entreaty.

"Put a bullet through me," he cried, "if you're a man!"

Stingaree shook a decisive head.

"Not if I can help it," said he. "But I fear I shall