lowed in her ear:

"They'll have their encore. What can you give them? It must be something
they know. 'Home, Sweet Home'? 'The Last Rose'? 'Within a Mile'? The
first, eh? Very well; it's a leaf out of Patti's book; but so are they
all."

And he struck the opening bars in the key of his own song, but for some
moments Hilda Bouverie stood bereft of her great voice. A leaf out of
Patti's book, in that up-country township, before a roomful held in
terror--and yet unmindful--of the loaded pistols of two bloodthirsty
bushrangers! The singer prayed for power to live up to those golden
words. A leaf out of Patti's book!

It was over. The last poignant note trembled into nothingness. The
silence, absolutely dead for some seconds, was then only broken by a
spirituous sob from the incorrigible stockman. There was never any
applause at all. Ere it came, even as it was coming, the overseer
Radford leapt to his feet with a raucous shout.

The bushranger had vanished from the platform. The other bushranger had
disappeared through the other door. The precious pair of them had melted
from the room unseen, unheard, what time every eye doted on handsome
Hilda Bouverie, and every ear on the simple words and moving cadences of
"Home, Sweet Home."

Ted Radford was the first to see it; for by the end of the brief song he
had his revolver uncovered and cocked at last, and no quarry left for
him to shoot. With a bound he was on the platform; another carried him
into the canvas anteroom, a third and a fourth out into the moonlight.
It was as bright as noon in a conservatory of smoked glass. And in the
tinted brightness one man was already galloping away; but it was
Stingaree who danced with one foot only in the stirrup of a milk-white
mare.

Radford rushed up to him and fired point-blank again and again. A series
of metallic clicks was all the harm he did, for Stingaree was in the
saddle before the hurled revolver struck the mare on the ribs, and sent
the pair flying through the moonlight with a shout of laughter, a cloud
of sand, and a dull volley of thunderous hoofs. The overseer picked up
his revolver and returned crestfallen to examine it in the lights of the
emptying room.

"I could have sworn I loaded it," said he. "If I had, he'd have been a
dead man six times over."

Miss Bouverie had been talking to Sir Julian Crum. On Radford's entry
she had grown _distraite_, but at Radford's speech she turned back to
Sir Julian with shini