s the defence?"

"You did it for a joke, of course!"

Oswald smiled inscrutably, and dismissed his visitor with a lordly
promise to consider the proposition and that lawyer's claims upon the
case. Never was such triumph tasted in guilty immunity as was this
innocent man's under cloud of guilt so apparent as to impose on every
mind. He had but carried out a notorious intention; for his few friends
were the first to betray their captain, albeit his bold bearing and
magnanimous smiles won an admiration which they had never before
vouchsafed him in their hearts. He was, indeed, a different man. He had
lived to see Stingaree in action, and now he modelled himself from the
life. The only doubt was as to whether at the last of that business he
had actually avowed himself Stingaree or not. There might have been
trouble about the horse, but fortunately for the enthusiastic prisoner
the man who had been thrown was allowed to proceed on a pressing journey
to the Barcoo. There was a plethora of evidence without his; besides,
the hide-and-bone mare was called Barmaid, after the original, and it
was known that Oswald had tried to teach the old creature tricks; above
all, the prisoner had never pretended to deny his guilt. Still, this
matter of the horses gave him a certain sense of insecurity in his cosey
cell.

He had awakened to find himself not only deliciously notorious, but
actually more of a man than in his heart of hearts he had dared to hope.
The tenacity and consistency of his pose were alike remarkable. Even in
the overweening cause of egoism he had never shown so much character in
his life. Yet he shuddered to realize that, given the usual time for
reflection before his great moment, that moment might have proved as
mean as many another when the spirit had been wine and the flesh water.
There was, in fine, but one feature of the affair which even Oswald
Melvin, drunk with notoriety and secretly sanguine of a nominal
punishment, could not contemplate with absolute satisfaction. But that
feature followed the others into the papers which kept him intoxicated.
And a bundle of these papers found their adventurous way to the latest
fastness of Stingaree in the mallee.

The real villain dropped his eye-glass, clapped it in again, and did his
best to crack it with his stare. Student of character as he was, he
could not have conceived such a development in such a character. He read
on, more enlightened than amused. "To think he