'Same here; but we can't let him go scot-free. That kink in the calf counts for nothing, and handin' him over to the beaks means too much worry. Here, give's a light, Burton.'
Mike struck a match, and, taking the thief by the ear, Harry Peetree drew a knife.
'Good God!' cried Jim, 'you don't mean to—' Jim's intervention was too late to help the prostrate man; Peetree had already slashed off the lobe of his left ear. He threw the fragment in the man's face.
'Now scoot!' he said, 'an' don't show yer ugly chiv on Jim Crow again, 'r you'll catch a fatal dose o' lead.
The crippled thief limped away without a word, pressing a palm to his streaming ear.
'That seemed an infernally brutal thing to do,' said Jim to his mate, when they were discussing the incident.
'Not a bit of it,' answered Burton. 'We've got to mark his sort, an' a brand like that's known every where. A bloke with an ear stripped off can't pretend to be a honest man here; he's got to be either a trooper or one of Her Majesty's commissioners.'
'But you weren't at all bitter about Solo.'
'Solo ain't a tent-robber; he generally robs the people who rob us. A tent-robber is the meanest kind of hound that runs.'
Jim was grateful for this lesson in diggers' ethics, and went peacefully to sleep on it, having by this time acquired complete confidence in Burton's hiding-place.