‘Now, my lad,’ he said, ’attend to me.  My name is Downy.  I am a detective, and I have found you out.’

The admission was not a wise one; it blanched Dick’s lips, but it closed them like a spring-trap.

‘I have found you out,’ continued the detective.  ‘He has been arrested.’  The detective emphasised the ‘he,’ and watched the effect.  Dick stood before him, white and silent, his heart beating with quick blows, and his blood humming in his ears, ‘Who?  Who?  Who?’

’The man who went down with you has been arrested, my lad, and now you must tell me the whole truth to save yourself.  He says you hammered Harry Hardy on the head with an iron bar, and if you do not clear yourself I must take you to gaol.’

Dick answered nothing; his eyes never moved from the green bee on the wall even to glance at his mother sobbing in the corner.

‘Come, come, come!’ cried Downy impatiently, ’it’s no good your denying that you were in the mine on Sunday night.  You came home covered with slurry, marked with blood, and very frightened.  Your mother admits that, and we have found your footprints in the clay of the Silver Stream drives at both levels.  Besides, the man says you were there.  Now, tell me this, and I will let you go free:  who has the key of the grating over the mouth of the old Red Hand?’

‘Oh!  Dickie, my boy, my poor boy—­why don’t you answer?’ sobbed Mrs. Haddon.

The detective tried again, threatened, pleaded, and cajoled, and Mrs. Haddon used all her motherly artifices; but not one word came from the boy’s locked lips.  Dick was possessed by a vivid hallucination; he seemed to be standing in the centre of a whirlwind.  Downy and his mother were dim figures beyond, seen through the dust; and like shreds of paper whirled in the vortex, visions of Miss Chris’s face, netted in fair hair, passed swiftly before his eyes, and the expression on each face was beseeching and sorrowful.  Nothing could have dragged the truth from him at that moment.

Downy stood up and hung over Dick, scratching his head in a despairing way.

I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but I’ll have to take him.’

‘He’s shieldin’ some villain,’ moaned Mrs. Haddon.

The detective took the widow aside and whispered with her for a few minutes, with the result that she dried her eyes and was much consoled.

Dick was taken away in Manager Holden’s trap and lodged in gaol at Yarraman; and when the news leaked out, as it did towards evening, Waddy had a new sensation, and quite the most startling one in its experience.  Before the women went to bed that night they had found Dick guilty of robbing the Silver Stream of thousands of ounces of gold and perpetrating a murderous assault on Harry Hardy.  The news brought Joe Rogers and Ephraim Shine together at their secret meeting-place in the corner paddock—­Rogers much disturbed and puzzled, Shine shaken almost out of his wits.