It was a strange and characteristic spectacle. The handsome, soldierly, comparatively refined man-at-arms, sitting upon his horse, affording a perfectly fair mark; the half-sullen, half-irresolute criminal, with the power of life and death in his wavering hands; but the mental pressure was too great. The old reverence for the representative of the Law was not all uprooted. A host of doubts and dismal visions of dock and judge, and manacled limbs, and the Sergeant sternly implacable, “reading him up” before a crowded court, rose before his overcharged brain. The conflict was too intense. With a muttered oath he flung down the historic Snider, and stood with outstretched hands, which the alert officer of police immediately enclosed in the gyves of the period.
“You’ve acted like a sensible chap,” said Stewart, patronizingly, as the handcuffs clicked with the closing snap. “I’m not sure that you won’t get off light. You have had the luck not to have killed anybody that I know of since you turned out.”
About the same time Mr. Redcap and the other semi-desperadoes had lowered their flags to Stangrove, his late guest, and Constable Kearney. This last warrior had, like his superior officer, lost no time in securing the prisoners. Four pairs of handcuffs were available for the elder men. The youngest brigand had his elbows buckled together behind his back with a stirrup-leather.
“Bedad! ye’re a great arr-my intirely,” said Mr. Kearney, complacently. “Sure it’s kilt and murthered I thought we’d all be with a lot of fine young men like yees forenint us. But the Docther there hadn’t the heart to rub out the Sergeant; ’tis the polite man he always was.”
“Well, they say taking to the bush is a short life and a merry one,” grumbled out Redcap in a kind of Surrey-side tragedy growl. “I know our time’s been short, and a dashed long way from merry. I’m thankful we ain’t shed any blood—leastways not killed any cove as I knows of.” Here he looked at Jack’s wounded arm, the blood from which had considerably altered the hue of his shooting-jacket.
“Oh! the divil a hanging match there’ll be, if that’s what ye’re thinking of,” said Kearney. “Sure when they didn’t hang Frank Gardiner why would they honour the likes of ye with a rope, and Jack Ketch, and a parson? Cock ye up with hanging indeed! Ye’ll be picking oakum or chipping freestone, or learning to make shoes and mats, ten years from now.”
“You have been at my station, I see by the rifles,” said Stangrove; “was that all you took?”
“Nothing else, Mr. Stangrove,” said Redcap, humbly, “as I’m a living man. We’d heard so much about them—that the big one could carry a mile and shoot all day—that we was bound to have ’em. But we done no harm, and the ladies wasn’t much frightened—not the young lady anyhow.”
“It’s lucky for you they were not,” said Stangrove, huskily; “and it may serve you something at your trial. Sergeant, what are you going to do with the prisoners? will you bring them to Juandah to-night?”
“No, sir, I propose to make straight for the gaol at Barrabri; we’ll get to the ‘Mailman’s Arms’ some time before to-morrow morning. It’s the first halt we shall make; so step out, you fellows. The sooner we get to Barrabri the sooner you’ll be comfortably in gaol, where you’ll have nothing to think of till the Quarter Sessions.”