sed
their pieces or thought of stopping him. If a dead man had rode right
into the middle of us he'd have looked like that. He stopped his horse,
and slipped off on his feet somehow.

He'd had a dreadful wound, any one could see. There was blood on the
rags that bound his head all up, and being round his forehead and over
his chin it made him look more and more like a corpse. Not much you
could see, only his eyes, that were burning bright like two coals of
fire.

Up to Starlight's body he goes and sits himself down by it. He takes
the dead man's head into his lap, looks down at the face, and bursts out
into the awfullest sort of crying and lamenting I ever heard of a living
man. I've seen the native women mourning for their dead with the blood
and tears running down their faces together. I've known them sit for
days and nights without stirring from round a corpse, not taking a bite
or sup the whole time. I've seen white people that's lost an only child
that had, maybe, been all life and spirits an hour before. But in all
my life I have never seen no man, nor woman neither, show such regular
right-down grief as Warrigal did for his master--the only human creature
he loved in the wide world, and him lying stiff on the ground before
him.

He lifts up the dead face and wipes the blood from the lips so careful;
talks to it in his own language (or leastways his mother's) like a woman
over a child. Then he sobbed and groaned and shook all over as if the
very life was going out of him. At last he lays the head very soft and
gentle down on the ground and looks round. Sir Ferdinand gives him his
handkerchief, and he lays it over the face. Then he turns away from the
men that stood round, and got up looking that despairing and wretched
that I couldn't help pitying him, though he was the cause of the whole
thing as far as we could see.

Sudden as a flash of powder he pulls out a small revolver--a
Derringer--Starlight gave him once, and holds it out to me, butt-end
first.

'You shoot me, Dick Marston; you shoot me quick,' he says. 'It's all my
fault. I killed him--I killed the Captain. I want to die and go with him
to the never-never country parson tell us about--up there!'

One of the troopers knocked his hand up. Sir Ferdinand gave a nod, and a
pair of handcuffs were slipped over his wrists.

'You told the police the way I went?' says I. 'It's all come out of
that.'

'Thought they'd grab you at Willaroon,' says he, look