of Waddy fought with the bearded usurpers long unsatisfactory contests, rearing and butting for hours, and doing each other no morsel of injury that anybody could discover.  A few of the women were out with buckets, making the most of the opportunity, milking all the nannies who would submit; and Devoy, with characteristic impetuosity, was already on the warpath, seeking vengeance on the person or persons whose act had led to the pillage of his vegetable beds.

During all this the innocence of the boys of Waddy, particularly those boys who had composed Moonlighter’s gang, was quite convincing.  They had kept their secret well, and for some time no act of vandalism was suspected.  In school during the morning they were most attentive, and particularly assiduous in the pursuit of knowledge; and when the echoes of a disturbance in the township penetrated the school walls, Richard Haddon and his friends may have exchanged significant winks, but nothing in their general demeanour would have betrayed them to the ordinary intelligence.  However, Joel Ham’s intelligence was not of the ordinary kind, and after looking up two or three times and catching the master’s little leaden eye fixed upon him with a glance of amused speculation, Dick began to feel decidedly uncomfortable.

The first hint of the truth was brought to Waddy by an infuriated female from Cow Flat.  She drove up in an old-fashioned waggon drawn by a lively and energetic but very ancient and haggard bay horse, with flattened hoofs and a mere stump of a tail.  She was tall and stout, with great muscular arms bare to the shoulder, and her face was pink with righteous indignation.  This woman drove slowly up the one road of Waddy, and standing erect in her vehicle roundly abused the township from end to end.  Crying her cause in a big strident voice, she insulted the inhabitants individually and in the mass, and wherever several people were assembled she pulled up and poured out upon them the vials of her wrath in a fine flow of vituperation; and after every few sentences she interpolated an almost pathetic plea to somebody, she did not care whom, to step forward and resent her criticism that she might have an opportunity of hammering decency and religion into the benighted inhabitants of an unregenerate place.

‘Who stole the goats?’ she screamed, and, receiving no answer, screamed the question from house to house.

‘Waddy’s a township of thieves an’ hussies!’ she cried, ‘thieves an’ hussies!  Gimme me goats or I’ll have the law on you all—­you low, mean stealers an’ robbers, ye!  Who stole the goats?  Who came by night an’ robbed a decent widdy woman of her beautiful goats?  Who?  Who?  Who?  Say you didn’t, someone!  Gi’ me the lie, you lot o’ gaol-birds an’ assassinators!’