mined the empty fetters. "All right be hanged," he
said. "If you don't know your duty better than this, the sooner you go
somewhere else the better, my man. Look here!"

The two ankle fetters were severed. One had been evidently filed
through, and the other broken transversely. The latter was bent, as from
a violent blow.

"Don't know where he got the file from," said Warder Short.

"Know! Of course you don't know. You men never do know anything until
the mischief's done. You want me here for a month or so. I'd teach you
your duty! Don't know--with things like this lying about? I wonder the
whole yard isn't loose and dining with the Governor."

"This" was a fragment of delft pottery which Frere's quick eye had
detected among the broken metal.

"I'd cut the biggest iron you've got with this; and so would he and
plenty more, I'll go bail. You ought to have lived with me at Sarah
Island, Mr. Short. Don't know!"

"Well, Captain Frere, it's an accident," says Short, "and can't be
helped now."

"An accident!" roared Frere. "What business have you with accidents?
How, in the devil's name, you let the man get over the wall, I don't
know."

"He ran up that stone heap," says Scott, "and seemed to me to jump at
the roof of the shed. I fired at him, and he swung his legs over the top
of the wall and dropped."

Frere measured the distance from his eye, and an irrepressible feeling
of admiration, rising out of his own skill in athletics, took possession
of him for an instant.

"By the Lord Harry, but it's a big jump!" he said; and then the
instinctive fear with which the consciousness of the hideous wrong
he had done the now escaped convict inspired him, made him add: "A
desperate villain like that wouldn't stick at a murder if you pressed
him hard. Which way did he go?"

"Right up Macquarie Street, and then made for the mountain. There were
few people about, but Mr. Mays, of the Star Hotel, tried to stop him,
and was knocked head over heels. He says the fellow runs like a deer."

"We'll have the reward out if we don't get him to-night," says Frere,
turning away; "and you'd better put on an extra warder. This sort of
game is catching." And he strode away to the Barracks.

From right to left, from east to west, through the prison city flew the
signal of alarm, and the patrol, clattering out along the road to New
Norfolk, made hot haste to strike the trail of the fugitive. But night
came and found him yet at large, and