The Shadow of a Man

by E. W. Hornung

"I'll trust you," he said; "you may do as you like about me. Perhaps you yourself have had the wish that's father to the thought, or rather the thought that comes of the wish and nothing else? Well, then, that's what's been the matter with me. The moment I heard of that old rascal's escape, like every other fellow in the force, I yearned to have the taking of him. Of course it wasn't on the cards, hundreds of miles up-country as we are here, besides being across the border; yet when they got clear away, and headed for the Murray, there was no saying where they might or might not cast up. Well, it seems they never reached the Murray at all; but last week down in Balranald I heard a rum yarn about a stowaway aboard one of the Echuca river-steamers; they never knew he was aboard until they heard him go overboard just the other side of Balranald. Then they thought it was one of themselves, until they mustered and found none missing; and then they all swore it was a log, except the man at the wheel who'd seen it; so I pretended to think with the rest—but you bet I didn't! I went down the river on the off-chance, but I never let on who I hoped it might be. And what with a swaggy whose swag had been stolen, and his description of the man who he swore had stolen it, I at last got on the tracks of the man I've lost. He was said to be an oldish man; that seemed good enough; they were both of them oldish men, the two that had escaped."

"The two!" cried Moya in high excitement. "The two! I keep forgetting there were two of them; you see you never said so when you came to the station."

"I wanted to keep it all to myself," confessed the crest-fallen sergeant. "I only told two living men who I thought it was that I was after. One was my sub—who guessed—and the other was Mr. Rigden."

"Were the two men who escaped anything like each other?"

"Well, they were both old lags from the Success, and both superior men at one time; old particulars who'd been chained together, as you might say, for years; and I suppose that sort of thing does beat a man down into a type. However, their friendship didn't go for much when they got outside; for Gipsy Marks murdered Captain Bovill as sure as emu's eggs are emu's eggs!"

"Murdered him!" gasped Moya; and her brain reeled to think of the hours she had spent with the murderer. But all was clear to her now, from the way in which Rigden had been imposed upon in the beginning, to the impostor's obstinate and terrified refusal to own himself as such to the very end.

"Yes, murdered him on the other side of the Murray; the body's only just been found; and meanwhile the murderer's slipped through my fingers," said the sergeant, sourly; "for if it wasn't poor old Bovill I was after, at all events it was Gipsy Marks."

Moya sprang to her feet.

"It was," she cried; "but he hasn't slipped through your fingers at all, unless he's dead. He wasn't when I left him two or three hours ago."

"When you left him?"