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Rh would have intimidated him. The bushrangers had chosen their spot; it was in Monie's Gorge, half way to the Beantree—a mountain with a slice out of it—boulders of rock lining the track and only room on the track for horsemen in single file; and who would think of going round the rocks, which looked as if they were part of the precipice behind, and who could have suspected a scooped out hiding-place, as if it had been made on purpose for midnight robbers and black horses that had the devil in them as much as their masters? He was jogging along—his hand on his revolver—every sense alert, from description, when, lo! a lasso had been thrown—it might have been a looped stockwhip that had jerked him from his saddle, causing him to scrape the rock—the sergeant showed the traces of the abrasion, but apparently no other hurt. Simultaneously it appeared other lassoes had been thrown, and with unerring aim over two of his mates. The black boy's head was covered later. For himself, he remembered only the darting onward of his horse, leaving himself grounded, the apparition of a masked man on a coal black steed—Abatos of course—a pair of gleaming eyes upon him, a revolver at his forehead, and a sudden swift throwing over his face of a thick cloth, saturated with chloroform. He had felt his hands being pinioned, and then he remembered no more. When he had come to his senses he had found himself in the hollow of a boulder, with a narrow belt of young white gums between him and the precipice, the diamonds gone, the horses gone, and his companions, including the black boy Benbolt, like himself, securely tied, each to a gum tree. The robbery had happened not ten miles from Luya Dell. Every man of them had been chloroformed. The whole thing had been done almost without a word. Four assailants were declared to; there might have been more; one of the troopers was certain there were five. What had become of the horses no one knew. The men had lain gagged and bound for hours. It was a lonely road, and they might have been there now had not Benbolt managed, with the aid of his toes, to get himself free. He had untied the others, and they had