When Nickie at length regained his stirrups, and worked himself into an upright position, he found the mare racing along a rough road between walls of bush, heading towards Tollbar, whence she had come on the previous day.

Nickie the Kid was not expert as an equestrian.  So far he had clung to the horse with desperate tenacity, and now that he had recovered his mental grip to some extent he could think of nothing to restrain the animal’s wild career, but he did think of the awful possibilities of his position, one of which was an apparent certainty.  The horse would carry him back to Tollbar, to its owner’s stable, the township would be drawn together by the extraordinary spectacle of a horse bolting through the place mounted by a gigantic monkey, the fraud would be discovered, and then the inhabitants would deal in their own gentle, characteristic way with the man who had been party to Professor Thunder’s shocking imposition.  Two days earlier Tollbar had patronised the museum.

These cheerful thoughts occupied Nickie’s mind while the mare was negotiating about five miles, and wearing much of the wool off Mahdi, and not a little cuticle off Mr. Crips; but he was saved the dread ordeal he anticipated by another disaster.  The mare caught a hoof in a rut and came down heavily, and presently Nickie recovered consciousness, lying on his back, blinking at the blue sky, gratified to find that he was not dead.

The mare was out of sight, and the Missing Link was at large in the bush, with a damaged head, a sprained ankle, a cracked rib, and a pain in every limb.  He arose and shook some, of the dust off himself, and then limped from the road and sat in the shade of a tree, with his back to the butt, to consider his lamentable situation and feel his injuries.

Nickie’s position was certainly an unpleasant one.  He could not walk back to Bullfrog, because he would be certain to meet people by the way, and the sight of a Missing Link prowling in the Australian hush might lead to disaster.  In any case, the sprained ankle made a five-mile walk impossible.  Nickie could not strip off his monkey make-up, because of the very scanty undergarments he possessed.

“What the deuce am I to do now?” groaned the victim, gently chafing his bruises.

He was answered by a shrill scream, an energetic and most piercing feminine yell of terror, and lifting his startled eyes he beheld a young girl, clad after the manner of a settler’s daughter, standing a few yards away, staring at him with wild horrified eyes.  The girl’s fingers were clutching her hair, her face was white, her limbs convulsed, she seemed glued to the spot, incapable of movement, but power of screaming remained with her, and she exerted it to the utmost—­she screamed, and screamed, and screamed again, the bush resounded with the echoes of her agonised cries.

For a moment Nickie stared back in blank surprise.  It had not struck him that he was the occasion of this frantic demonstration, but presently he realised that a little screaming was excusable in an excitable young lady coming suddenly upon a full-grown missing link drowsing under the gums in her native bush.