sort of chaps, on the cross or not, like
them all the better for it.

When I say all of us, I don't mean Moran. A sulky, black-hearted,
revengeful brute he always was--I don't think he'd any manly feeling
about him. He was a half-bred gipsy, they told us that knew where he was
reared, and Starlight said gipsy blood was a queer cross, for devilry
and hardness it couldn't be beat; he didn't wonder a bit at Moran's
being the scoundrel he was.

No doubt he 'had it in' for more than one of the people who helped the
police to chevy Wall and his lot about. From what I knew of him I was
sure he'd do some mischief one of these days, and make all the country
ten times as hot against us as they were now. He had no mercy about him.
He'd rather shoot a man any day than not; and he'd burn a house down
just for the pleasure of seeing how the owner looked when it was
lighted.

Starlight used to say he despised men that tried to save themselves
cowardly-like more than he could say, and thought them worse than the
bush-rangers themselves. Some of them were big people, too.

But other country gentlemen, like Mr. Falkland, were quite of a
different pattern. If they all acted like him I don't think we should
any of us have reigned as long as we did. They helped and encouraged the
police in every possible way. They sent them information whenever they
had received any worth while. They lent them horses freely when their
own were tired out and beaten. More than that, when bush-rangers were
supposed to be in the neighbourhood they went out with them themselves,
lying out and watching through the long cold nights, and taking their
chance of a shot as well as those that were paid for it.

Now there was a Mr. Whitman that had never let go a chance from the
start of running their trail with the police, and had more than once
given them all they knew to get away. He was a native of the country,
like themselves, a first-class horseman and tracker, a hardy, game sort
of a chap that thought nothing of being twenty-four hours in the saddle,
or sitting under a fence watching for the whole of a frosty night.

Well, he was pretty close to Moran once, who had been out by himself;
that close he ran him he made him drop his rifle and ride for his life.
Moran never forgave him for this, and one day when they had all been
drinking pretty heavy he managed to persuade Wall, Hulbert, Burke, and
Daly to come with him and stick up Whitman's house.

'I sent w