‘Wasn’t game,’ answered Parrot; ’they’d ‘a’ watched me.  Had to sneak away as it was.’

Dick puckered his face wisely.  It was a very dirty face just now; his red hair, long neglected, hung in wisps over his forehead and about his ears, giving him an elfish look in the candlelight.

‘Never mind,’ he said, ’bring us some to-night, first chance you get; but be cunnin’.  We’ll shake some fruit soon ez it’s dark, to keep us goin’.’

‘What’s the good o’ fruit?’ groaned Peterson.  Fruit ain’t grub.’

Dick looked anxiously at his mate.  There was an immediate danger that the outlaws might be starved out.

‘Parrot’s goin’ to fetch some,’ he said brightly.

Parrot promised to do his best for them, but, although they waited till nearly nine o’clock in hungry anticipation, he did not return that night.  The last carrot was eaten, and a cautious excursion to Summers’ orchard produced nothing, Maori’s warning bark driving the boys back to the Gaol Quarry, empty and disconsolate.  Billy could hold out no longer, but he did not meditate an open desertion.

‘I’ll jes’ sneak round our house till I get a chance to slip in an’ shake a junk o’ bread or somethin’; then I’ll come right back an’ we’ll go halves,’ he said.

‘Sure you’ll come back, are you?’

’’S that wet?  ‘S that dry?’

Dick accepted the oath.  He would have gone home himself with burglarious intentions, but feared that the official anxiety to catch the notorious head of the new gang must have concentrated police vigilance about his mother’s house, and the risk was too great.

‘Hurry back ez quick’s you can,’ he commanded. ’’N you’ll have to be slyer ’n a black snake ‘r they’ll nab you.’

Dick spent the first hour alone under the saplings in the quarry, and then, as Billy had not returned and the time hung heavily on his hands, he crept out and up the hill towards the Red Hand.  He prowled about amongst the old tips for a time, then seated himself at the foot of a dead butt and gave himself up to thought.  He began to fear that Peterson would prove unfaithful, or, worse still, that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy; and the idea made him very uneasy.  He hesitated about returning to the drive.

Although he was singularly free from the superstitious fears that would make such a place a haunt of horrors to the average youngster, the notion of sleeping alone below there did not please him, and he had still some hope of hearing Billy’s signal.

He was beginning to feel the pangs of hunger, too, and now that it was too late recollected that he might have found a ministering angel in Miss Chris. It would have been an easy matter to have met her when coming through the paddock from chapel at nine o’clock, and an easier matter to have appealed to her tender sympathies with a story of hunger and misfortune.  The boy’s thoughts lingered with Miss Chris;