and wanting to throw the police off the scent once more. If we'd really
wanted to make tracks, they said, this would be the last thing we'd
think of doing. Bit by bit it was put about as there should be a
carefully laid plot to stick up all the banks in Turon on the same day,
and make a sweep of all the gold and cash.

I laughed when I saw this, because I knew that it was agreed upon
between Aileen and Gracey that, about the time we were fairly started,
whichever of them saw Sir Ferdinand first should allow it to be
fished out of her, as a great secret, that we were working up to some
tremendous big affair of this sort, and which was to put the crown on
all our other doings. To make dead sure, we had sent word to Billy the
Boy (and some money too) to raise a sham kind of sticking-up racket on
the other side of the Turon, towards Bathurst way. He was to frighten a
few small people that would be safe to talk about it, and make out that
all the bush-rangers in the country were camped about there. This was
the sort of work that the young villain regularly went in for and took
a pleasure in, and by the way the papers put it in he had managed to
frighten a lot of travellers and roadside publicans out of their senses
most.

As luck would have it, Wall and Hulbert and Moran had been working up
towards Mudgee lately and stuck up the mail, and as Master Billy thought
it a great lark to ride about with them with a black mask on, people
began to think the gangs had joined again and that some big thing,
they didn't know what, was really on the cards. So a lot of police were
telegraphed for, and the Bathurst superintendent came down, all in a
hurry, to the Turon, and in the papers nothing went down but telegrams
and yarns about bush-rangers. They didn't know what the country was
coming to; all the sober going people wishing they'd never got an ounce
of gold in Australia, and every little storekeeper along the line that
had 100 Pounds in his cash-box hiding it every night and afraid of
seeing us ride up every time the dogs barked.

All the time we were heading for Cunnamulla, and leaving New South Wales
behind us hand over hand.

The cattle, of course, couldn't travel very fast; ten or twelve miles a
day was enough for them. I could have drowned myself in the creeks as
we went crawling along sometimes, and I that impatient to get forward.
Eighty miles it was from Cunnamulla to the Queensland border. Once we
were over that we'd hav