'Good boy! What for?'

'He had been "running" me—wanted to make me break out, I suppose. I couldn't stand it any longer and went for him.'

'Why didn't yer choke the —— wretch?'

'Because I hadn't time.' Here the savage joy which he experienced when his enemy lay gasping beneath him came with a rush of recollection, and the old fire, so long absent, glowed lurid in his eyes. 'Another second or two and Bracker would have been a dead man.'

'Bracker, was it?' said one of the younger convicts. 'I was under him at Pentridge, and a —— dog he was! He tormented a cove there till he hanged himself. I'm dashed glad he copped it, anyhow.'

'You're a right 'un, anyhow,' said the older convict approvingly. 'It wants a chap like you now and then to straighten them infernal wretches that think a man's like a log of wood as you chop and chip at till it's all done. I learned one of 'em different on the other side, and there's one or two here as'll get a surprise yet if they don't look out.'

At this stage of the conversation the slowly-ascending contrivance reached the upper deck, and the inmates became as stolidly silent as Eastern mutes.

One by one, covered by the rifles of the deck guards, they stepped out and followed each other in the shuffling walk peculiar to heavily-ironed men along and around the deck. Each man was a certain distance behind the one immediately preceding him. The foremost man walked to the bow of the vessel. When reached, he turned stiffly round as if by machinery, and resumed the same monotonous tramp in the opposite direction.

Melancholy treadmill and mockery of locomotion as was this parade, still it was not wholly without its attractions. The vision arose before their aching eyes of the blue sky, the dancing wave, the far-off purple mountain. There drove seaward an outgoing steamer. Alas, alas! what a world of vain regrets did she evoke in Lance's mind! There were white-winged gulls, yachts and skiffs that resembled them in free and graceful flight. All these constituted a pageant impossible of production within prison walls. Then the ocean breeze, with every inspiration after the fœtid atmosphere of the lower deck, revived and in a sense exhilarated them. These joys and glories of the sea could not be shut out even from the gaze of the fettered captives, unless the further refinement of punishment of blindfolding had been added. And even in the President none of the officials had hit upon this deterrent device.

So by the time that Lance and his fellows had completed their allotted tramp, at the end of which time he was fatigued, unused as he was to lift his legs with such an encumbering weight, he felt, somewhat to his surprise, that his general tone had been raised. He saw the shore, then known as Liardet's Beach, which did not seem so great a distance away. He could imagine in the night, when a dense fog enveloped the mud flats of the bay, the low sandy beach, the thickets of the tall ti-tree (melaleuca), that either by swimming or with friendly aid a prisoner might cross the intervening stretch of mud flat, so dreary and darksome at low water, and, disappearing into the thickets, be as little likely to be again seen as a ghost flitting at cock-crow.