said Hollis. "They must have got away
earlier than they expected."

"No--they--."

A sharp cry--an exclamation of fear and terror, and men's voices raised,
loud and peremptory.

"That's not--" began Bessie, but Hollis pushed past her into the
house. It was a bush house built in the usual primitive style of
bush architecture, with all the rooms opening one into the other and
dispensing with passages altogether. The dining-room, a big sparsely
furnished room, had doors both front and back, and looked on the yard
behind as well as on the garden. The table was laid for a substantial
tea. Mrs. Warner, Bessie's stepmother, a good-looking woman of thirty,
was at the head of the table with the tea-pot in her hand, but the
children had left their places and clustered round her; two other girls
of sixteen and eighteen were clinging to one another in a corner, and
two women servants, raw Irish emigrants, were peering curiously out into
the yard, where half a dozen horses and men were now standing. The cook,
an old assigned servant, had taken in the situation at once, had made
for the dining-room followed by the other two, and was now sitting in
the arm-chair, her apron over her head, beating the ground with her
feet.

Hollis saw it all at a glance--the big dining-room, the frightened
women, the silent children, the sunlit yard beyond, the horses hitched
to the post and rail fence, the half dozen bearded blackguardly men,
with pistols and knives in their belts--noted it all, even to the blue
and white draped cradle in the corner of the room, and the motes dancing
in the sunbeams that poured in through the end windows--noted it all,
and looked down on the girl at his side.

"Oh, my God!" he muttered, "it's the Mopoke's gang, and--."

He was unarmed, but he looked round vaguely for a second. Two of the men
stepped into the doorway and covered him with their pistols.

"Bail up, you -----," said the shorter of the two, a man in a dirty red
shirt and torn straw hat, who was evidently the leader of the party,
"bail up; throw up your hands, or--," and he added such a string of vile
oaths that Bessie, shuddering, covered her face with her hands. Hollis
did not at once obey, and in a second a shot rang out and his right hand
fell helpless at his side--shot through the wrist.

"If the gent prefers to keep 'em down, I 'm sure we 're alius ready to
oblige," said the little man, with grim pleasantry, interlarding his
speech with a var