At that moment recollection flashed upon Jim.  He recalled the adventure with Long Aleck in the Bourke Street bar, and the robbery of Brigalow, the gold-buyer, at Diamond Gully.  His hand was upon Ryder again:  he gazed at him with a new apprehension.

‘Sit,’ he said.  Ryder seated himself on a stump by the side of the young man, and Jim continued: 

’You say Miss Woodrow noticed a strong resemblance between us.  Others have remarked it.’

’I am not surprised.  There is no difference in our faces but that which years have made.’

’It was in Melbourne on the night of my arrival.  I was attacked in a bar by a man who mistook me for Solo.’

The brothers looked into each other’s eyes for some little time, Jim anxiously, Ryder with no appearance of concern in his strong, handsome face.

‘I am the man they call Solo.’

‘Solo the robber!’ Instinctively Jim had moved back from the other, but Ryder took no notice of the action.

‘My boy,’ he said, ’there are two kinds of men—­the active criminal and the passive.  I am fairly active.’

‘But the blind folly of it—­here, where fortunes are made so easily!’

’Are they?  You have had a bit of luck.  There are thousands on the rushes who do not make tucker.  In any case I could not afford to place myself directly under the supervision of the troopers.  Not that I had any weak desire to earn an honest living, by the way.’

‘What are you hoping for?  Where is it all leading?’ Jim felt an emotion of despair.

‘Perhaps you would rather hear no more to-night.’

‘I must hear all.  For God’s sake, speak!’

’I have been in hell.  For fifteen years I remained in the convict prisons.  It might have been fifteen centuries, an eternity.  Everything beyond is so distant that my youth seems a mere dot in the perspective.’

Ryder was talking in a clear, even, unemotional voice.

’I cannot hope to give you anything approaching a true idea of the horror of that life.  I know I can only faintly comprehend it myself now.  Taken from happiness, a comparative boy, I was plunged into a state of absolute torment, an existence of brutalizing labour, ceaseless cruelty, and blackest infamy.  I herded with men who had degenerated from criminals into brutes under the influence of the infamous system.  Those fifteen years served to burn out of me most of the fine emotions and sentiments on which civilized men pride themselves, and then, during the blackest year of all, a wild craving to preserve something of humanity arose within me.  That was my salvation.  I had always before me the hope of escape.  I fought now cease to retain some qualities of clean manhood, that I might appear amongst fellow as a man, and not like one of the lowering monsters by whom I was surrounded—­men upon whose every feature and limb were stamped the repulsive brands of the lag.  During that first period I maintained an attitude