“For me!” exclaimed Ned, holding out his hand.  “Who is it from?”

“I’m not to say,” answered the urchin, slipping away.

The other men laughed.  “There must be a young lady interested in you, Hawkins,” said one jocularly; “our Sydney girls always have good eyes for the right sort of a man.”  “I wondered why you stayed over last night, Hawkins,” remarked another.  “Trust a Queenslander to make himself at home everywhere,” contributed a third.  Ned did not answer.  He did not hear them.  He knew who sent it.

Then the guard’s whistle blew; another moment and the train started, slowly at first, gradually faster, amid a pattering of good-byes.

“Give him a cheer, lads!” cried one of his friends.  “Hip-hip-hurrah!”

“And one for his red rose!” shouted another.  “Hip-hip-hurrah!”

“And another for the Queensland bush men!  Hip-hip-hurrah!”

Ned leaned over the door as the train drew away, laughing genially at the cheering and waving his hand to his friends.  His eyes, meanwhile, eagerly searched the platform for a tall, black-clad figure.

He saw her as he was about to abandon hope; she was half concealed by a pillar, watching him intently.  As his eyes drank her in, with a last fond look that absorbed every line of her face and figure, every shade of her, even to the flush that told she had heard the cheer for “his red rose,” she waved her handkerchief to him.  With eager hands he tore the fastening of a fantastically-shaped little nugget that hung on his watch-chain and flung it towards her.  He saw her stoop to pick it up.  Then the train swept on past a switch-house and he saw her no more, save in the picture gallery of his memory stored with priceless paintings of the face he loved; and in the little photo that he conned till his fellow-passengers nudged each other.

* * * * *

At Newcastle he left the train to stretch himself and get a cup of tea.  As he stepped from the carriage a man came along who peered inquisitively at the travellers.  He was a medium-sized man, with a trimmed beard, wearing a peaked cap pulled over his forehead.  This inquisitive man looked at Ned closely, then followed him past the throng to the end of the platform.  There, finding the bushman alone, he stepped up and, clapping his hand on Ned’s shoulder, said quietly in his ear: 

“In the Queen’s name!”

Ned swung round on his heel, his heart palpitating, his nerves shaken, but his face as serene as ever.  It had come, then.  After all, what did it matter?  He would have preferred to have reached his comrades but at least they would know he had tried.  And no man should have reason to say that he had not taken whatever happened like a man.  At the time he did not think it strange that he was not allowed to reach the border.  The squatters could do what they liked he thought.  If they wanted to hang men what was to stop them?  So he swung round on his heel, convinced of the worst, calm outwardly, feverish inwardly, to enquire in a voice that did not shake: