The wounded trooper had recovered somewhat, and was on his hands and knees, with down-hanging head, in the light of the open door.

‘How are you, Casey?’ asked the detective anxiously.

‘Aisy, sor.  I’m jist wonderin’ if I’m dead or alive,’ said the trooper in a still small voice, watching the blood-drops falling from his forehead.

‘Then the devil a bit’s the matter with you, Casey.’

‘Thank you, sor,’ said the trooper, with a trained man’s confidence in his superior.  ‘Thin I’d best git up, p’raps.’  And he arose and stood dubiously fingering the furrow plowed along the top of his head by the gold stealer’s bullet.

‘Get him into the hut,’ said Downy, indicating Rogers with a nod; ’and hobble the brute—­he’s dangerous.’

Rogers, sitting on the edge of his bunk, handcuffed and leg-ironed, gazed sullenly at the detective.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘an’ now you’ve got me, what’s the charge?’

‘A trifle of gold-stealing,’ replied Downy, ‘and this,’ indicating Casey’s bleeding head.  ‘To say nothing of the murder of your accomplice.’

Rogers blanched and glared at the detective, his face contorted and his eyes big with terror.

‘Shine,’ he murmured, ‘d’ye mean Shine?  It’s a lie; he’s not dead!’

Harry Hardy, who had just come upon the scene and was standing in the doorway, cried out at this.

‘Great God!’ he said.  ‘Then it was Ephraim Shine after all!’

‘Pooh!’’ cried Rogers, ‘it was a trick to trap me into givin’ his name.  You needn’t ‘a’ troubled yerself.  I don’t want to shield him—­damn him!’

‘Do you know where this Shine’s to be got at?’ asked Downy, appealing to Harry, who had been working in concert with the detective ever since his appearance in Waddy.

‘Yes,’ was the reply.  ‘I know his house.  He’ll be easily taken.’

’Then go with the sergeant.  Take Casey’s horse.  It’ll be with the other.  Here,’ he threw Harry a revolver.  ’Case of need, you know, but no shooting if it can be avoided.’

Harry thrust the weapon in his belt, and a minute later he and Sergeant Monk rode off in company to take Ephraim Shine in the name of the Queen.

Meanwhile Dick was not at the bottom of the Piper shaft, as Rogers concluded in his haste.  Joe had not left the boy half a minute when a second man made his appearance on the other side of the shaft.  This was Downy, in his drover disguise.  The detective, whose sole object in assuming the disguise was to watch Dick, believing that the boy would be sure to communicate with the real thieves, had witnessed his capture by Rogers and had followed in the latter’s tracks; and now, after being entertained and instructed by the words that had passed between Rogers and his captive, he cut Dick down, quickly frayed the end of the rope between two stones, and cut away Dick’s bonds, throwing the rope and gag into the shaft.