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272 "The diamonds, oh, my lady, the diamonds! They've been stolen."

"Stolen!" cried Elsie Valliant, starting forward, as pale as Prentiss.

"Who has stolen them?" thundered Lord Waveryng.

"Moonlight," dramatically exclaimed Prentiss.

was too true. The celebrated Waveryng diamonds were now in the possession of a gang of masked bandits, presumably Moonlight and his followers. The troopers and Benbolt, the black boy, had come back to tell the tale. Never was man of mettle and responsibility more crestfallen than the sergeant. He handed Lord Waveryng his bank note back again. "I don't deserve it, my lord, and you'll believe me when I say that I'd rather have had my leg cut off—I'd rather have lost my life than that this should have happened. But I'll get them—we'll have them back, my lady. Two of us went on to Goondi. The Government know of it by this time. All the telegraph wires in the colony are working—he can't escape. I'm off to the Gorge as soon as Lord Horace will put me on a fresh horse, to tell Captain Macpherson and the Colonial Secretary. The country shall be raised; the Luya shall be scoured. No, they sha'n't escape us this time, unless Moonlight is the devil incarnate, and that he must be to have known what we were carrying last night and to have taken us the way he did."

The sergeant's story was after all a simple one, though he was incoherent in its telling. He took some pride in recounting the diabolic ingenuity of the trap that had made it impossible for him to offer any resistance. Moonlight had surely known that not even the muzzle of a revolver