“Know! Of course you don't know. You men never do know anything until the mischief's done. You want me here for a month or so. I'd teach you your duty! Don't know—with things like this lying about? I wonder the whole yard isn't loose and dining with the Governor.”
“This” was a fragment of delft pottery which Frere's quick eye had detected among the broken metal.
“I'd cut the biggest iron you've got with this; and so would he and plenty more, I'll go bail. You ought to have lived with me at Sarah Island, Mr. Short. Don't know!”
“Well, Captain Frere, it's an accident,” says Short, “and can't be helped now.”
“An accident!” roared Frere. “What business have you with accidents? How, in the devil's name, you let the man get over the wall, I don't know.”
“He ran up that stone heap,” says Scott, “and seemed to me to jump at the roof of the shed. I fired at him, and he swung his legs over the top of the wall and dropped.”
Frere measured the distance from his eye, and an irrepressible feeling of admiration, rising out of his own skill in athletics, took possession of him for an instant.
“By the Lord Harry, but it's a big jump!” he said; and then the instinctive fear with which the consciousness of the hideous wrong he had done the now escaped convict inspired him, made him add: “A desperate villain like that wouldn't stick at a murder if you pressed him hard. Which way did he go?”
“Right up Macquarie Street, and then made for the mountain. There were few people about, but Mr. Mays, of the Star Hotel, tried to stop him, and was knocked head over heels. He says the fellow runs like a deer.”
“We'll have the reward out if we don't get him to-night,” says Frere, turning away; “and you'd better put on an extra warder. This sort of game is catching.” And he strode away to the Barracks.