Mr. Broughton, upon whose wrists the handcuffs were safely adjusted, merely nodded, upon which the trooper requested Mr. Neuchamp to permit his hands to be similarly fettered.
‘What?’ said Ernest, flushing so suddenly, at the same time making a stride forward, that the wary official backed his horse, and taking out his revolver, presented it full at his head.
‘What for?’ said the trooper; ‘why, on suspicion, of course, of being concerned with the Captain here, in the Barrabri Bank robbery the other night, that all the country is going mad about.’
Here the Captain found his tongue.
‘You’re going mad yourself, Taylor; the reward and the mobilisation, as you call it, have been too much for you. There’s no evidence against me this time, nothing that you could call evidence worth a rap; and don’t you see that this is a gentleman just out from home, and green as grass; or he wouldn’t go on foot with a thundering big knapsack on his back, picking up with—ahem—shady characters like me.’
‘That’s all very well, Captain,’ assented the trooper; ‘but the cove’s hair and complexion, and height, and age, as was with you in the plant, and Police Gazette, corresponds with the other prisoner’s.’
Ernest’s face, at this description of himself, was a study; so sharply engraved were the lines which indicated wrath, disgust, and horror.
‘Very sorry, my man, and all that,’ continued Senior-Constable Taylor, who had not got the stripes for nothing, ‘in case your turn don’t square, but you must come before the police magistrate of Boonamarran and see what he thinks about it. I won’t put the darbies on ye, if you’ll promise to come quietly, but by —— if you leave the track for a moment I’ll send a bullet through you before you can say knife.’
Under this proclamation of martial law, there was nothing to be done by any sane man but to submit; so Ernest made answer that he had no objection to walking as far as Boonamarran, where no doubt his innocence would be made clear.
In a kind of procession, therefore, was Ernest Neuchamp forced, as the Captain would have said, ‘by circumstances’ to make his appearance in the small but not wholly unimportant town of Boonamarran. As they passed up the principal street, a very large proportion of the available inhabitants must have assembled to mark their arrival at the lock-up.