“What luck?”

“This,” said S——­th,—­“the price of my life,” throwing on the ground the paper roll.

“Pound-notes,” cried S——­k, taking them up.  “One, two, three, four, five; more than sixpence.”

“Where is the man?” cried S——­th, as, seizing the notes from the hands of S——­k, he turned round.  Then, throwing down the gun, he set off after his victim; but the latter was now ahead, though his pursuer heard the clatter of his heavy shoes on the metal road.

“Ho, there! stop! ’twas a joke—­a bet.”

No answer, and couldn’t be.  The man naturally thought the halloo was for further compulsion, under the idea that he had more to give, and on he sped with increased celerity and terror; nor is it supposed that he stopt till he got to his own house, a mile beyond Davidson’s Mains.

Smith gave up the pursuit, and with the notes in his hand, ready to be cast away at every exacerbation of his fear, returned to his cowardly companions with hanging head and, if they had seen, with eyes rolling, as if he did not know where to look or what to do.

“What is to be done?” he cried; and his fears shook the others.

“Yes, what is to be done?  You urged me on.  Try to help me out.  Let us go back and seek out this man.  To-morrow it may be too late, when the police have had this robbery in their hands as a thing intended.”

“We could not find the man though we went back,” said S——­k.  And his companions agreed.

But W——­pe, who had some acquaintanceship with the police Captain Stewart, proposed that they should proceed homewards, go to him, give him the money, and tell the story out.

“That, I fear, would be putting one’s hand in the mouth of the hyaena at the moment he is laughing with hunger, as they say he does.”

An opinion which S——­th feared was too well founded.  Nearly at their wits’ end, they stood all three for a little quite silent, till the sound of a horse’s clattering feet sounded as if coming from Davidson’s Mains.  All under the conviction of crime, they became alarmed; and as the rider approached, they concealed themselves behind the dyke, which ran by the side of the road.  At that moment a man came as if from Edinburgh, and they could hear the rider, who did not, from his voice, appear to be the man who had been robbed, inquiring if he had met a young man with a gun in his hand.  The man answered no, and off set the rider towards town at the rate of a hard trot.  The few hopeful moments when anything could have been done effectually as a palinode and expiation were past; and S——­th, releaping the dyke, was again upon the road in the depth of despair, and his companions scarcely less so.  All his and their escapades had hitherto been at least within the bounds of the law; and though his heart had often misgiven him, when called upon for the nourishment of his wild humours, as he thought of his widowed mother at home, without the comfort