Page:The Irish in Australia.djvu/90

 foes, found out his place of concealment, and they carried him to a safe retreat in the neighbourhood, where the wounded arm was successfully amputated by a friendly surgeon. Then, under the protection of the good priest, Father Patrick Smyth, arrangements were made to have the rebel commander removed as speedily as possible from the hot and vengeful pursuit of the authorities. A few days after the storming of the stockade, Patrick Carroll, an Irish carrier, arrived in Ballarat with a load of goods from Geelong, and on the return trip he had a solitary passenger, the man for whose body, dead or alive, the government emissaries were scouring the country in all directions. Carroll did his best to conceal the fugitive leader under a tarpaulin and the boughs of trees, and, by keeping as far as possible from the frequented roads and driving through lonely bush tracks, he succeeded in reaching Geelong without having attracted any hostile notice. Camping outside the town until night came on, the faithful Irishman drove his distressed compatriot to the appointed place of refuge. Notwithstanding that a large money reward was offered by the government for Lalor's apprehension, and although his place of concealment was well-known to many, not a solitary scrap of information did the government receive, so loyal and hearty was the sympathy of the people at large with the oppressed diggers and the cause for which they had suffered. "It is a curious commentary on the events of those times," remarks one of the historians of the colony, "that whereas the Government of Victoria then offered so large a sum for Mr. Lalor's dead body, they are now glad to pay him £1,500 a year to live." This is an allusion to the fact that the erstwhile rebel of 1854, with a price on his head, is now the first commoner of Victoria and admittedly one of the ablest