“Got them?” cried the governor.
“Yes, Sir John,” said the leader of the police, whom Nic recognised now as the chief warder whom he had talked with during the voyage out; “but we had to shoot one of ’em down.”
“Here, quick, ’fore he goes!” said Brookes to the warder, huskily. “Handcuffs,” and he pointed to Mayne.
“Eh? What? Him?” said the warder. “Why, he helped to take one of ’em.”
“Yes,” cried Nic; “he was fighting to save me.”
“I surrender,” said Mayne faintly; “I’m satisfied now. Dr Braydon, I never told you I was an ill-used man, but did my work. Still, I told your son. Dominic, lad, Heaven is just. That handcuffed hound is my old fellow-clerk, for whose sins I have suffered all these years. There are miracles in life, for it fell to me to take him when he was escaping.”
“After he had watched to take your life!” cried Nic. “He was waiting, you know where? There, Sir John—father, will you believe it now?”
The doctor had been kneeling by the fallen convict, roughly bandaging a bullet wound when, as he turned to rise, Frank Mayne struck him aside, and flung himself upon the wounded man.
The doctor turned fiercely upon Mayne, but the next moment he grasped the truth, just as a blow from the butt end of a musket struck the ruffian back; for as soon as the wound had been bandaged, the man had waited an opportunity to draw a knife and strike at him who had tried to assuage his pain.
In a short time the party was on its way back, the wounded convict borne upon a roughly made stretcher, and Frank Mayne walking with the warder, to Brookes’s great disgust, for the doctor had said that he would answer for his not attempting to escape.