'A couple of mares will not matter much, and, besides, he got the horse back for me,' replied Shaw.
'That constable who came with Sergeant Machinson says he's a bad lot, and not to be trusted. He may have been in with Dalton's gang over this affair.'
'Don't be a fool and talk rubbish,' said Shaw. 'If he were one of the gang we should not have recovered the horse.'
He went inside, leaving Beg grumbling in the yard.
'I must keep in with Jim Dennis,' Rodney Shaw said to himself. 'He'll be useful to me. I am sorry my memory is so bad,' and he laughed curiously. 'So Adye Dauntsey is police magistrate at—what the deuce is the name of the place?—oh, here it is, and he picked up a piece of paper—Barragong. I wonder if the worthy P.M. will think I have altered much during the last eight or nine years. Probably he will, most people about here think me changed, even Benjamin Nix, my manager, says he would hardly have known me. The worthy Nix has not altered much, I'll be bound. So far as I can judge, he has managed things all right at Cudgegong—what a name to give a place! but it is suitable.'
'Jim Dennis is a man to be trusted, and he will stick to a pal, he says, and I know he will keep his word. It's deuced slow here after London. I think in a few years I'll sell out and go back again. And if I do return, that lady friend of mine will probably find me out and create a scene. I hate scenes. Perhaps I am better off here, and in time I may settle down into a respectable married man.'
He laughed again, but there was no mirth in the sound. It was an ugly laugh, a laugh that betrayed the baseness of the man, the treachery lurking within. It was not a good laugh to hear.
CHAPTER IX
THE SORT OF MAN DR TOM IS
Dr Tom Sheridan sat in his den concocting cooling drinks for himself, and mixtures of quite a different prescription for his patients.