When Harry Hardy and the trooper rode up to Shine’s house half an hour later, they found the place deserted.  The door was on the latch, and the interior gave no indication of a hurried departure, but the searcher was nowhere to be seen.

‘It’s all right,’ said Harry, ’he’ll be somewhere about the township.  I’ll take a trip round an’ see if I can hit on him, if you’ll stay here an’ keep watch.’

‘Right,’ said the sergeant, ’but you’d best drop in on Downy and let him know.  If our man gets wind of what’s happened he’ll skedaddle.’

‘If he doesn’t we’ll nab him at the mine at one.’

Harry found that Downy had disposed of his prisoner, having converted the cellar at the Drovers’ Arms into a lock-up for the time being, and smuggled Joe Rogers in so artfully that McMahon’s patrons in the bar were quite ignorant of the proximity of the prisoner and of the presence of the guardian angel sitting patiently in the next room, tenderly nursing a broken head and a six-barrelled Colt’s revolver.

Harry and Downy searched Waddy from end to end in quest of Ephraim Shine, and saw nothing of him.  Downy interviewed Christina without betraying his identity or his object, but could get no inforination of any value; and when the missing man failed to put in an appearance at the Silver Stream to search the miners from the pump coming off work, the hunt was abandoned for the time being.

‘He’s got wind of my game and cleared,’ said Downy, ’but we’ll have him before forty-eight hours have passed.’

‘But how could he know?’ asked Harry, impatient to lay Shine by the heels.

’May have heard the shots.  May have been hiding anywhere.  But, never fret, we’ll round up your friend, my boy.  Men of his make and shape are as easy to track as a hay waggon.’

In the early hours of the morning Downy drove his prisoner into Yarraman, and that day’s issue of the local Mereury contained a thrilling description of the capture of the Waddy gold-stealer—­a description that created an unprecedented demand for the Mercury, and quite compensated the gifted editor for, the heartburnings he had endured over the bushranging fiasco.

Waddy was dumbfounded when the Mercury came to hand, and horribly disgusted to think the stirring incident described had happened right under its nose, without its having the satisfaction of witnessing the least moving adventure or catching even a glimpse of the prisoner.  Joe Rogers a free man was a familiar and commonplace object, but Joe Rogers handcuffed and leg-ironed in the custody of the law was a person of absorbing interest, and Waddy would have turned out to a man and woman to give him an appropriate send-off.