"I got off all right, and the moon was as clear as day, and everything just ripe for sticking a chap up. Then, like a fool, having a longish time to wait, I didn’t simply stop in shadow behind a tree-trunk or something in the usual way, but thought I’d do a thing I’d never heard of bushrangers doing, though Indian thugs are pretty good at it. I went and got up a tree which has a branch over the road, and I thought I’d drop down almost on top of Frenchy to start with. And that’s just what I did do, only I dropped wrong, and came down pretty nearly on my head owing to slipping somehow at the start. What did exactly happen to me as I left the tree I never shall know. Anyway, Frenchy came along sure enough, and I dropped, and he jumped I should think fully a yard in the air; but that was all, because in falling I hit a big root (it was a beech-tree), and went and broke something in my ankle and something in my chest and couldn’t stand. Consequently, of course, I couldn’t stick him up. The pain was pretty fair, but feeling what a fool I was seemed to make me forget it. Anyway, finding it was useless to think of sticking him up, I tried to hobble into the fern and get out of sight; and finding I couldn’t crawl, I rolled. But of course you can’t roll away from a chap, and he came after me, and my mask fell off while I rolled, and he recognized me.
"‘Mon Dieu! it is the boy Maine!’ he said. ‘Speak, child, what in the wide world was this?’
"I disguised my voice and said I wasn’t Maine, and that he’d better leave me alone or it might be the worse for him yet. But he wouldn’t go, and, chancing to get queer about the head somehow I went off, I suppose, though it wasn’t for long. When I came to he was gone, but he rushed back in a minute with that rotten old top-hat he wears full of water he’d got from the puddle in the stone-pit. He doused my head and made me sit up with my back against a tree. Then, feeling the frightfulness of it, I begged him to clear out and let me alone. I said:
"‘You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m no friend to you, but the deadliest enemy you’ve got in the world, and if I hadn’t fallen down at a critical moment and broken myself I should have stuck you up, Monsieur Michel. So, now, you know.’
"He said to himself, ‘The poor mad boy--the poor mad boy--I will run à toutes jambes for succor’; but I told him not to. I began to get a rum hot pain in my side then, but I felt I would gladly have died there rather than be obliged to him. I said:
"‘You called me an “aborigine,” which is the most terrible thing you can call an Australian-born chap, and you wanted to pass it off with a knife with a corkscrew and tweezers in it. But you couldn’t expect me to take it, feeling as I did. Now the fortunes of war have given you the victory, and, if you please, I wish you’d go.’
“But he refused. He said he wouldn’t have hurt my feelings for anything. He seemed to overlook altogether what I was going to do to him, and asked me where it hurt me. I told him, and he said it was his fault--fancy that! and wished he was big enough to carry me back. I kept on asking him to go, and at last, after begging my pardon like anything, for about a week it seemed, he went. But I heard him shouting and yelling French yells in the woods, and after a bit he came back with two men and a hurdle. They presently took me back, and what Frenchy’s said since to the Doctor I don’t know. In fact, I didn’t know anything for days. Anyway, I’ve had nothing but a mild rowing and very good grub, and I’m not to be even flogged, though that’s probably because I broke a rib or two, not including the bone in my leg. But I’m all right now, and I think it was about the most sporting thing a chap ever did for Frenchy to treat me like that--eh? I shouldn’t have thought it was in a Frenchman to do it, especially after I told him what I was going to do.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s all right, but what about bushranging?”
“It’s pretty sickening,” he said, “but I feel as if all the keenness was knocked out of me. If a chap can’t so much as fall out of a tree on a wanderer’s path at the nick of time without smashing himself, what’s the good of him?”
“Besides,” I said, “if it hadn’t been Frenchy, but somebody else of a different turn of mind, he might have taken you at a disadvantage and jolly well killed you.”