When Professor Thunder came to shake up his justly celebrated Link, he found the cage empty, and a bar wrenched from its place in the back wall.  He drew his own conclusions—­conclusions most unfavourable to Mahdi—­and used his own language.  He closed his show, and went raging about Loo township in quest of his stray freak.

Nickie the Kid awakened from a death-like sleep in the early hours of a warm summer Sunday.  Dawn steeped the bush in crimson, the smoke of a dying camp-fire curled high in the air and its top most spiral caught the red glow of the young sun.  About that camp-fire, twisted on their rugs and blankets on the grass in the quaint attitudes of out-door drunks, lay four shearers, Bill, Mike, Ben, and Fred. Near them were scattered various bottles, all empty.

Nickie rubbed his eyes with his hairy paw, and stared at the recumbent figures.  His head seen as capacious as an iron tank, and every inch of it held a special and independent ache.  The Missing Link was trying to think.

Understanding came in a flash.  He had been stolen from the show.  These rascals had given him hocussed rum, and had got him away, probably tied to one of the horses.  His aching limbs hinted at that, and he could see the horses grazing among the trees.

Nickie reviewed the situation.  He was tethered to a tree, his bonds were stout, and his captors had not made sufficient allowance for the almost human intelligence of Professor Thunder’s star performer.  All about were scattered the utensils of a late supper, and with the aid of a stick the Link contrived to draw a knife within reach.  With this he promptly cut the rope.

When free Nickie went quietly and deliberately to work to overhaul an open swag.  He took a coat, pair of trousers, a pair of boots, and a hat, and with these under his arm retired to the bush to make his toilet.

An hour later three shearers, Bill, Fred, and Ben, riding at a gallop along the high road to Loo, came upon a man with a bundle walking cheerfully in the same direction.  The horsemen pulled up.

“Hi, mate, have you seen anythin’ of a strange sort of animal on this road?” cried Bill.

“Have I?” answered the man.  “My word, I have!  A great, big, red, hairy bunyip ‘r somethin’ charged out o’ th’ bush ’bout a mile back, bowled me over an’ went howlin’ down th’ road in a cloud o’ dust.”

“Which way?” gasped Bill.

The pedestrian pointed in the direction of Loo.  “That’s th’ way he went,” he said.  “Cripes, I’d a’ thought I seen a fantod on’y I bin teetotal fer a year.”

The shearers whipped up, and rode on at a gallop, and the man grinned after them with exquisite joy.  “Well, life’s worth living after all.” said Nickie the Kid.

Before Sunday night it was known at Loo that the Missing Link, which had been stolen or had escaped, was once more safely bestowed in Professor Thunder’s Museum, and when the show opened on Monday there was something like a run on it.  With the curious crowd came Bill, Ben, and Fred, Mike having been left to keep camp.  At the sight of the shearers before his cage, the Missing Link simulated a paroxysm of ungovernable rage.  He bit, glared, roared, and reaching his mighty claws towards Bill, made murderous sweeps in the air, as if desirous of disembowelling that hapless young man.