the military; the
rebel flag was torn down; huts and tents inside the enclosure were
going up in flames.

Towards six o'clock, just as the December sun, huge and fiery, thrust
the edge of its globe above the horizon, a number of onlookers ran up
the slope to all that was left of the ill-fated stockade. On the dust,
bloodstains, now set hard as scabs, traced the route by which a
wretched procession of prisoners had been marched to the Camp gaol.
Behind the demolished barrier huts smouldered as heaps of blackened
embers; and the ground was strewn with stark forms, which lay
about--some twenty or thirty of them--in grotesque attitudes. Some
sprawled with outstretched arms, their sightless eyes seeming to fix
the pale azure of the sky; others were hunched and huddled in a last
convulsion. And in the course of his fruitless search for friend and
brother, an old instinct reasserted itself in Mahony: kneeling down he
began swiftly and dexterously to examine the prostrate bodies. Two or
three still heaved, the blood gurgling from throat and breast like
water from the neck of a bottle. Here, one had a mouth plugged with
shot, and a beard as stiff as though it were made of rope. Another that
he turned over was a German he had once heard speak at a diggers'
meeting--a windy braggart of a man, with a quaint impediment in his
speech. Well, poor soul! he would never mouth invectives or tickle the
ribs of an audience again. His body was a very colander of wounds. Some
had not bled either. It looked as though the soldiers had viciously
gone on prodding and stabbing the fallen.

Stripping a corpse of its shirt, he tore off a piece of stuff to make a
bandage for a shattered leg. While he was binding the limb to a board,
young Tom ran up to say that the military, returning with carts, were
arresting every one they met in the vicinity. With others who had been
covering up and carrying away their friends, Mahony hastened down the
back of the hill towards the bush. Here was plain evidence of a
stampede. More bloodstains pointed the track, and a number of odd and
clumsy weapons had been dropped or thrown away by the diggers in their
flight.

He went home with the relatively good tidings that neither Ned nor
Purdy was to be found. Polly was up and dressed. She had also lighted
the fire and set water on to boil, "just in case." "Was there ever such
a sensible little woman?" said her husband with a kiss.

The day dragged by, flat and stale