start saddling. The others
followed in a few minutes. And there was the horse-yard overflowing with
moonshine, but empty alike of man and beast.

"I wonder what's got him?" murmured the bewildered sergeant uneasily.

"Old Harry, for all I care!" muttered the other. "I'm no such nuts on
him, if you ask me. There's a bit too much of him for my taste."

In his secret breast the sergeant entertained a similar sentiment, but
he was too old an officer to breathe disaffection in the ear of his
subaltern. He contented himself with a mild expression of his surprise
at the conduct of the Sydney authorities in putting a "towny" over his
head without so much as a word of notice.

"And such a 'towny'!" echoed Tyler. "One you never heard of in your life
before, and never will again!"

"Speak for yourself!" rejoined Cameron, irritated at the exaggeration of
their case. "I have heard of him ever since I joined the force."

"Well, he's a funny joke to have shoved over us, a blooming little
hunchback like that."

"I always heard that he was none the worse for what he couldn't help,
and now I can understand it," said the sergeant, "for he's not such a
hunch----"

The men looked at each other in the moonlight, and the ugly word was
never finished. A dozen hoofs were galloping upon them, their thunder
muffled by the sandy road, and into the tank of moonshine came two
horses, hounded by the detective bareback on the third.

"Someone left the slip-rails down, and they were all over the
horse-paddock," he panted. "But I took a bridle and managed to catch
one, and it was easy enough to run up the other two."

But even Constable Tyler thought the more of their misshapen leader for
the feat.

There was now no time to be lost, for it approached midnight, but the
trio were soon cantering through the horse-paddock neck-and-neck, and
the new day found them at the farther gate. The moon still poured
unbroken brilliance upon that desert world of sandy stretches tufted
with salt-bush and erratically overgrown with scrub. The shadow of the
gate was as another gate lying ready to be hung; for each particular
wire in the fence there was a thin black stripe upon the ground. The
three passed through, and came in quick time upon the edge of that scrub
in which the crime had been committed. And here the chief called a halt.

"The two to nail him must be on foot," said he. "You can creep upon him
on foot as you never could with a horse; but I will