“I don’t know,” answered Bell; “I was too much engaged to look at the man; some escaped convict, probably.”
“You are partly right, but you ’av’nt guessed who he is,—’e’s Rayon, the Frenchman! The police have recognized ’im as an escaped convict, and ’av carried him off to jail more dead than alive. I remembered afterwards, when Dromoora was tying him up he said, ‘French feller’; but I was ’alf stunned by all that ’appened, and didn’t know what he meant. I’ll never speak French again.”
“I see it all now,” replied her husband; “what a lot of fools we were to be gulled so, and what a doubly-distilled ass I was not to listen to Mat when he wanted to stay behind, saying he thought there was danger about.”
Mrs. Bell listened eagerly to the account of Annie’s rescue by Mat.
“What a brave man he is,” she said; “he must live with us altogether; we can never repay him. I must ‘embrasser’ him; I—I—mean embrace him, and Dromoora too.”
“As you say, we cannot fully repay him,” joined in her husband; “but I have some plans that I will talk over with you by-and-by.”
The news of the death of one bushranger and the capture of another soon rang over the whole district, the newspapers especially devoting their columns to what they knew of the history and doings of the two miscreants.
There was no doubt that it was the intention of the bushrangers to murder all who opposed them.
One paper stated that the leader of the gang, the notorious Magan, had long been outlawed, and that he fought with a halter round his neck, for that his previous career showed that he had shot more than one man in cold blood; it related that—
“Upon one occasion this fiend had ridden up to a station down south, and had ordered the inmates to ‘Bail up!’ This they at once did, being taken by surprise. Magan had then shot at and wounded one of the men, then despatched another for the doctor, and then had deliberately shot him as he was going away upon his errand.”