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216 lightly to the floor, now stood irresolute. In the end he let the rascals go. Their footsteps had already left the saddle-room; the groom listened and lost them in the night; then he felt about for his clothes.

He was thankful he had not waylaid the thieves at the saddle-room door; the field would have been too unequal, the consequences perhaps too serious for one and all. And he foresaw the neatest triumph now. Jarman’s name had given him a foregone victory, for now he knew the way to Jarman’s ramshackle hut, and the saddles should be back upon their pegs before morning: so full was Tom of confidence as he dressed himself in the dark. But the thought of betraying his comrades in captivity was as far from his heart as that of allowing his master’s saddles to be quietly stolen before his eyes. Stolen they might be, but only for the moment; he would call in Macbeth and his mate to see how nice they looked in the morning.

In a few minutes he was fully dressed, and dodging Roberts (the night-watchman) behind the convict huts. No other man among them would have found this precaution necessary; but the groom was an unpopular character, whom Roberts would have reported none the less readily after winking (as he must have done) at the theft of the saddles. With luck and ingenuity Tom managed to elude him, however, and was soon racing down the wooded slope where the timber was being felled; leaping the stumps as he ran, and steering by the Southern Cross for the southern boundary of the farm, which was, in fact, the creek on whose further bank the squatter was now encamped.

It was a perilously clear night. A white moon grizzled the peeling bark of a small forest of red gums; and the