“Don’t repine, Smith,” said Murden; “when you get back to Melbourne I’ll see that you have a yoke of cattle to replace them.”

“I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, Smith,” Fred exclaimed, “but as the cattle are dead and cannot be brought to life, I think that the best thing we can do is to satisfy our appetites from their carcasses.  I, for one, am hungry, and think that a pound of steak is almost worth its weight in gold.  Let’s strip the skin from one of the brutes, and see whether the flesh is burned up.”

“A good idea, and one that we will adopt,” cried Murden, with alacrity.  “Maurice, where is your knife?”

The officer did not wait for a second bidding, for he scraped off the worst of the burned portions of the hide, and then ripped it off, leaving about the hind quarters as juicy and wholesome looking meat as a man could wish for when in a state of hunger.  Smith turned away, too much grieved to touch the food thus opportunely prepared, but the rest of us showed no such signs of delicacy, for in a twinkling our knives were out and cutting huge slices of the beef.  The smell was very provoking of hunger, and so Smith thought, for he apparently could stand abstinence no longer.  He joined us in our attack, and muttered as he did so: 

“I don’t see why the rest of you should fill up, while I starve; although I still contend, that to tie the poor things up and let them die such a death was cowardly and mean.”

And always after that, if Smith wished to express the very quintessence of brutality and meanness, he would refer to the death of his favorites.

Our dinner was soon despatched, and once more we shouldered our arms, and under the direction of Steel Spring, skirted along the edge of the forest in quest of the lair of the bushrangers.  We had proceeded but a mile or two when we saw the three men left in charge of the horses, galloping along apparently in search of us; and when they discovered that we were alive, and but little the worse for our fiery siege, their astonishment knew no bounds.

They stated that the flames had lighted up the country for miles in extent, and that they had tried to raise a party of miners, on their way to Melbourne, to come to our assistance; but that fear of being robbed or losing their lives prevented them.  In fact, every one they had spoken to had construed the fire into a ruse of the bushrangers to entrap people, and would not believe that a large police force was in the woods, and surrounded by fire on all sides.

We gladly mounted our animals, for the men had taken the precaution, by the advice of the old convict’s daughter, to bring our own horses with the rest; and then mounted Steel Spring behind Maurice, first taking the precaution of tying them together for fear of mistakes, as we told the former, and not from any doubts of his honesty—­an admission which made the fellow grin until his huge mouth expanded from ear to ear.