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"Well I should say so," cried Frank joyously, and he slipped the man a bill of large denomination. "I'll buy everybody a drink," shouted Davis, shuffling off. "Come on, boys, we've no time to lose!" Frank exclaimed the next minute and they hastened round to the house of M. Desplaines' friend. This time that worthy was at home and greeted them warmly.

The men swung to their saddles and followed the wagon at a shuffling trot. From where she rode between Evans and Harris, the girl turned in her saddle and watched two men throw open the gates of the big corral where the remuda was held.

There were plain marks on the ground, and even as inexperienced woodsmen as the two boys could easily see that these had undoubtedly been made by the big feet of a shuffling man! "He was here, all right!" said Thad, in an awed tone, as he looked all around him. Maurice took several steps forward, as if mechanically starting to follow the plain imprints of those big shoes.

In short, he made many shuffling and evasive answers, not boldly lying out, which, perhaps, would have succeeded, but poorly and vainly endeavouring to reconcile falsehood with truth; an attempt which seldom fails to betray the most practised deceiver. How impossible was it therefore for poor Booth to succeed in an art for which nature had so entirely disqualified him.

We mounted the car. The groups of men drew about us, their movements again sounding like the shuffling of shy animals on the sod, and they broke silence for the first time. There was more said about Kevin Hooban. From various allusions, vague and unsubstantial, little touches in the kind, musical voices, I gathered that they believed him to be under the influence of the Good People.

As he walked on, all these noises combined together into a piece of elaborate music whose harmonious phrases came persuasively through a great disorderly murmur of voices and shuffling of feet on the gravel of that open space.

Only the day before the second anniversary of the Eureka Stockade he had watched some two to three hundred men, with crepe on their hats and sleeves, a black-draped pole at their head, march there to do homage to their fallen comrades. The dust raised by the shuffling of these many feet had accompanied the procession like a moving cloud; had lingered in its rear like the smoke from a fire.

To all this I received no one satisfactory answer, and, from the shuffling on every complaint, I formed the worst opinion of his intentions.

He stared down at it with blinking eyes, shuffling awkwardly with his feet, and at that moment his face seemed very worn, and lined, and his hair very grey, yet I had a feeling that I should not regret my quixotic action in the end. "Sir," he faltered, "sir, do ye mean ?" and stopped.

So the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies as many as five altogether for the musicians. And the sun fell lovingly upon the pretty scene.