“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you in as few words as possible,” the shepherd said, resting from his work for a few seconds while speaking.  “We three coveys ain’t no match for thirty coveys, is we?”

We acknowledged that there was a difference, and that it was favorable to the side of the larger force.

“Very well; then it becomes necessary to deceive ’em, same as we use to do when I was an apprentice in London, when master would put a body in a pine coffin, all flourished off with paint and varnish, and then charge it as cherry.”

“What has that to do with the matter in hand?” I demanded impatiently.

“Much—­I intend to make the bushrangers think, if we come in contact with ’em, that they have got a ghost instead of a man to deal with, and I needn’t tell you how frightened they will be; you know that by your own experience, don’t you?”

There was no denying the assertion, however much disposed we might feel to quarrel with such perfect frankness at the present time.  At any rate, we no longer manifested symptoms of impatience, but waited until Day had secured the bones, which were somewhat loosened by the shot from my pistol.

“I think that I’ve got strings enough arter all,” he said, shaking the head to see if it was firm and fit for use.  “It ’pears all right, and I think will answer.”

He placed the huge mass of whitened bones upon his head, and then shook it in a defiant manner, and I no longer wondered at our fright.

“There, I think that will do.  Now let me first tie up my sheepskins, and then we will start.”

In a few minutes the sheepskins were secured in their proper places, and Day stood before us a ghost of the first magnitude, and looking hideous enough to frighten his Satanic Majesty himself had he been encountered in the vicinity of Mount Tarrengower.

“I ain’t got much beauty,” Day said, while we were admiring him, “’cos I trust to inside appearances.  But don’t I look lovely? as we use to say at a first class funeral, when we had gone to some expense to get up the body in pretty good style.”

We assured the shepherd that his attractions were of the first order, and that we appreciated his exertions in our behalf, and with these few compliments we walked towards the bridge, the ghost leaving his long gun behind.

“Ghosts,” he said, in explanation, “is supposed to do unheard-of things, but I doubt whether any regular one ever walked around the earth with a gun; and if we should encounter the bushrangers, I think I should have more influence unarmed, for to give the devils their due, they don’t, care a rush for the smell of gunpowder, while they is firm believers in spirits, ’cos there is a sort of a tradition that a proprietor of a sheep farm, who was murdered some years since, wanders round nights, and makes himself generally disagreeable.  I don’t put any faith in the stories, ’cos I don’t believe that there ever was a ghost, excepting one like me got up for the occasion.”