"Know what's in it!" said Starlight, turning towards him as quick as lightning, and speaking with an angry tone in his voice, which all the music of it failed to hide. "That's just like you. A miserable, sneaking lot of pickpockets that cannot trust me to do a single thing for your benefit and my own without doubting me and poking and prying into it. Stand out of the way there, Middance, and let the boy through," said Starlight, in a voice that somehow the man obeyed without a murmur. Then turning to Yesslett, he added, "and now, boy, be off, and don't let me catch you stopping to listen to what I say."
Martin Crosby had quietly slipped out of the room before Middance had placed himself in the doorway, so that when Yesslett, who was quickly outside the house, had crossed to the path, he found the great fellow awaiting him in the shadow of a mossed and stunted tree.
Directly that he thought Yesslett was out of hearing, Starlight turned again to the startled looking men.
"I will tell you what that letter contained, since you must know. Oh, never mind that fellow Law," said Starlight, impatiently, in answer to the nods and signals of one of the more cautious of the men, "we have got him safe enough, for some time at least, and he knows who and what we are, so it's no good our humbugging him. He knows we're thieves, so what's the use of our aping honest men. Well, that letter was one I have manufactured for the purpose of inducing Lingan and that lubberly son of his to go to Bateman to-morrow. They'll rise to the fly, I know. And this is the reason I've done it.
"We have made Norton's Gap our headquarters for some time past, and it is about time we flitted. I don't hold with keeping in one place too long, as you know, and I've a sort of notion that our whereabouts is suspected, and that won't do for us. What I mean to do is this. To-morrow both the Lingans will start early for Bateman, and when they are out of the way we'll just drop down there in a friendly way, make a clean sweep of everything in the house—I know there is a pile of dollars—and then quietly vamose the ranche."
This was such a piece of base ingratitude—for the Lingans had been invariably faithful and friendly to the bushrangers—that some of the men murmured a feeble dissent, but none of them had the moral courage to boldly oppose Starlight's determination. There is a sort of bravado in vice amongst a band such as this; none of the men likes to own himself feebler in evil-doing than his fellows. Besides this there was something so fiendish in Starlight's unblushing iniquity, in his total want of morals, and in the pride he seemed to take in his own infamy and degradation that it overpowered the men, whose sense of right and wrong was dulled, if not destroyed, by the life of crime that they lived.
"What about Big Eliza?" asked one of the men.
"Oh," said Starlight, with a smile that would not have disgraced an angel, "she'll squeal a bit, and perhaps call me some hard names, for the fool thinks that I like her just because she chooses to like me. She won't do us any harm. I verily believe I could tell her what I intend doing without her saying a word to her husband, or trying to stop us."
And so he truly might have done. He knew only too well what his influence over women was. He was aware of his own beauty, and recognised its power; he therefore never neglected his appearance, and was always becomingly dressed. "From no sense of vanity I can assure you," he once said to Crosby, smoothing down his breeches to the curves of his thighs as he spoke, "but I know the value of my stock-in-trade too well to let it deteriorate as long as I can help it."
"Don't be too sure of Big Eliza," squeaked Foster from somewhere in the background. "She've got a temper of her own."