. I sha'n't consult you, my fine friend."

Stingaree drooped and nodded, lower and lower; then recovered himself
with a jerk, like one battling against sleep. The party pushed on for
another hour. The heat was terrible; the bound men endured torments in
their bonds. But the nature of the Superintendent, deformed like his
body, declared itself duly at every turn, and the more one prisoner
groaned and the other blasphemed, the greater the zest and obduracy of
the driving force behind them.

Noon passed; the scanty shadows lengthened; and Howie gave more trouble
of an insensate sort. They reined up, and lashed him tighter; he had
actually loosened his cords. But Stingaree seemed past remonstrance with
friend or foe, and his bound body swayed from side to side as the
little cavalcade went on at a canter to make up for lost time.

[Illustration: Stingaree toppled out of the saddle.]

He was leading now with the kindly sergeant, and his mind had never been
more alert. Behind them thundered the recalcitrant Howie with constable
and Superintendent on either side. They were midway between Mazeppa and
Clear Corner, or some fifteen miles from either haunt of men. Stingaree
pulled himself upright in the saddle as by a superhuman effort, and
shook off the helping hand that held him by one elbow.

He was about to do a thing at which even his courage quailed, and he
longed for the use of his right arm. It was not absolutely bound; the
hand and wrist had been badly hurt in the Sunday's fray--so badly that
it had been easy to sham a fracture, and have hand and wrist in splints
before the arrival of the police. They still hung before him in a sling,
his good right hand and fore-arm, stiff and sore enough, yet strong and
ready at a moment's notice, when the moment came. It had not come, and
was not coming for a long time, when Stingaree set his teeth, lurched
either way--and toppled out of the saddle in the path of the cantering
hoofs. His lashed feet held him in the stirrups; the off stirrup-leather
had come over with his weight; and there at his horse's hoofs, kicked
and trampled and smothered with blood and dust, he dragged like an
anchor, without sign of life.

And it was worse even than it looked, for the life never left him for an
instant, nor ever for an instant did he fail to behave as though it had.
Minutes later, when they had stopped his horse, and cut him down from
the stirrups, and carried him into the shade of a hop-bus