‘Go on!’ The boys looked back apprehensively.

’No, ’twasn’t.  ’Twas a big feller.  I dunno who; but he must ‘a’ bin a bushranger, ’r a feller what’s escaped from gaol, ’r someone.  Did you coves see which way he went?’

‘No,’ said Ted fearfully; and a simultaneous move was made towards the township.  The boys were not cowards, but they had plenty of discretion.

‘Look here,’ Dick continued impressively; ’no matter who ’twas, we’ve gotter keep dark, see.  If we don’t it’ll be found out what we was all up to, an’ we’ll get more whack-o.’

The party was unanimous on this point; and when Dick returned home he shocked his mother with a lively account of how he slipped in the quarry and fell a great depth, striking his head on a rock, and being saved from death only by the merest chance imaginable.

CHAPTER VII.

The small, wooden Wesleyan chapel at Waddy was perched on an eminence at the end of the township furthest from the Drovers’ Arms.  The chapel, according to the view of the zealous brethren who conducted it, represented all that counted for righteousness in the township, and the Drovers’ Arms the head centre of the powers of evil.  For verbal convenience in prayer and praise the hotel was known as ’The Sink of Iniquity,’ and the chapel as ‘This Little Corner of the Vineyard,’ and through the front windows of the latter, one sabbath morn after another for many years, lusty Cornishmen, moved by the spirit, had hurled down upon McMahon and his house strident and terrible denunciations.

Materially the chapel had nothing in common with a vineyard; it was built upon arid land as bare and barren as a rock; not even a blade of grass grew within a hundred yards of its doors.  The grim plainness of the old drab building was relieved only by a rickety bell-tower so stuffed with sparrows’ nests that the bell within gave forth only a dull and muffled note.  The chapel was surrounded with the framework of a fence only, so the chapel ground was the chief rendezvous of all the goats of Waddy—­and they were many and various.  They gathered in its shade in the summer and sought its shelter from the biting blast in winter, not always content with an outside stand; for the goats of Waddy were conscious of their importance, and of a familiar and impudent breed.  Sometimes a matronly nanny would climb the steps, and march soberly up the aisle in the midst of one of Brother Tregaskis’s lengthy prayers; or a haughty billy, imposing as the he-goat of the Scriptures, would take his stand within the door and bay a deep, guttural response to Brother Spence; or two or three kids would come tumbling over the forms and jumping and bucking in the open space by the wheezy and venerable organ, spirits of thoughtless frivolity in the sacred place.