There was little time to say more. The horseman had crossed the creek and, riding at a hand-gallop, pulled up at the door, throwing his bridle-reins, stock-rider fashion, on the ground, and leaving the hard-ridden hackney, a grand three-parts bred animal, to recover his wind and graze on the green tussock grass till he should need him.
Without apparently taking notice of the stranger who, in ordinary miner's garb, stood by the old man,—most probably taking him for a wandering prospector or hard-up 'hatter,'—he called out, advancing the while—
'I say, old King of the Duffers, do you know there's half-a-dozen chaps from Monaro waiting for you at Dobbs' Hole? They've a stunning lot of nags with them, so you'd better scratch all you know and get there before dark. Who's this cove? Perhaps he'll give us a hand? I must have a pot of tea first, though.'
He moved towards the hut door, near which Lance and the old man were standing. Lance stepped forward.
'So we meet again, Lawrence Trevenna?'
Trevenna was no coward. Still the sudden apparition of a deadly enemy—as if he had arisen from the earth—would disturb the equilibrium of most men. He started back. But a life filled with risk and imminent peril had schooled his nerves. He smiled, as if in apparent good-fellowship.
'By Jove! So it's you, Trevanion? Who'd have thought of seeing you here? Well, you've slipped the clinks, it seems. I was always dashed sorry you got into that scrape so deep. You'd better go shares with Coke and the rest of us in this lay. There's money in it—pots and pots of it.'
'D—n you and your money too, you scoundrel!' shouted Lance, advancing upon him with hate burning in his eyes and vengeance written on every line of his countenance. 'You!—You propose to me to share in your villainies? Have not you and your accomplices worked me ruin enough already? Put up your hands!'
Trevenna smiled and took his ground. Among the younger members of the lawless gang with which he had allied himself he had seen many a similar encounter, half or wholly in earnest. And in the pugilistic practice so popular among Australian youths of all classes, Larry Trevenna, to which cognomen he had been, for greater convenience, reduced, was held to be, if not the very cleverest of that wild band, so near the top of the class that there were few—very few—that cared to arouse his anger.
He had, as he supposed, advanced considerably in the science of the prize ring, and fondly trusted that the fast and vigil inseparable from a bushman's life would render him more than a match for any infernal swell (as he would have phrased it), especially one who had so lately 'done time,' and been therefore precluded from the enjoyment of fresh air and exercise.