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We didn't smoke then, and we used to sit in the verandah, and Aileen would talk to us till it was time to go to bed. Even when we went into Bargo, or some of the other country towns, they did not seem so much brighter. Sleepy-looking, steady-going places they all were, with people crawling about them like a lot of old working bullocks. Just about as sensible, many of 'em.
'Never mind, boys, they'll increase that reward yet, by Jove! It will have to be a thousand a piece if they don't look a little sharper. We laughed, and dad growled out 'Don't seem to have the pluck, any on ye, to tackle a big touch again. I expect they'll send a summons for us next, and get old Bill Barkis, the bailiff at Bargo, to serve it.
It's deuced slow work watching all night, though it isn't cold. We've got to be in Bargo barracks to-night, so there's no time to lose. It was all over now the worst HAD come. What fools we had been not to take the old man's advice, and clear out when he did. He was safe in the Hollow, and would chuckle to himself and be sorry, too when he heard of my being taken, and perhaps Jim.
We thought we'd have no one at the little church at Bargo but George and his wife, the old woman, and the chap as drove me home. Just as we were going into the church who should come rattling up on horseback but Maddie Barnes and her husband Mrs. Moreton, as she was now, with a bright-looking boy of ten or eleven on a pony. She jumps off and gives the bridle to him.
We sent out our scout, Warrigal, and he got our letters and papers too, from a 'sure hand', as Starlight said the old people in the English wars used to say. The papers were something to see. First he brought us in a handbill that was posted in Bargo, like this:
The other trooper reports that he was shot down and the party attacked by persons concealed in the thick timber near Wild Horse Creek, at the edge of Bargo Brush. In the confusion that ensued the prisoner escaped. It was at first thought that Walsh was fatally injured, but our latest report gives good hope of his recovery.
It came into my head now to wonder why the sergeant and two policemen had come down from Bargo, very early in the morning, about three months ago, and asked father to show them the beef in his cask, and the hide belonging to it. I wondered at the time the beast was killed why father made the hide into a rope, and before he did that had cut out the brand and dropped it into a hot fire.
They could ride, some of them, above a bit, and it made me think of the old days when Jim and I and Aileen used to ride into Bargo races together, and how proud we were of her, even when she was a little thing, and we used to groom up the old pony till we nearly scrubbed the hide off him.
So Starlight and I knew that our chance was a lot better than if we'd been tried at Bargo or Dutton Forest, or any steady-going places of that sort. If we'd made up our minds from the first that we were to get into it it wouldn't have been so bad; we'd have known we had to bear it.
Here's their horses' tracks right enough. Here's the prisoner's horse, see how he stumbled? and this road they're bound to go till they cross the Stony point, and get into Bargo Brush, near a creek. We had plenty of time by crossing a range and running a blind creek down to be near the place where the troopers must pass as they crossed the main creek.
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