“That’s curious.” said Professor Thunder, regarding the shearer sternly.  “My Link don’t often go on like that, and when he does he has good reason.  See here, young gentlemen, what did you have to do with the purloining of my man-monkey Saturday night?”

Bill protested fiercely.  “Never put a hand on yer blanky monkey.  Wouldn’t touch him with er forty-foot pole.”

“Well, he as good as says you did.”

Bill grinned.  “You can’t send a bloke up on th’ say so of a Missin’ Link,” he said.  “You can’t put a monkey in the witness box t’ swear a man’s character away.”

“I don’t know,” said the Professor.  “That’s a delicate point of law, but we may as well have a word with the constable about it.”

The shearers didn’t stay to take part in the consultation with the constable—­Professor Thunder had not expected them to.  “They lit out in a great hurry,” he explained to the Missing Link at lunch time.  “With a bit of engineering I might have shaken a few pounds out of them in the way of compensation.  I was too hasty.  Now, we’ll have to leave their punishment in the hands of heaven, and there is no money in that.”

“Heaven has punished them already, Professor,” said the Missing Link, with a wide, simian smile.

“How that?”

Nickie’s smile deepened.  “There was eleven pounds in the pocket of the trousers I borrowed to come home in,” he said.

CHAPTER XVII.

A narrow escape.

Thunder’s Museum of Marvels was showing at Wildbee, and doing only moderately, much to the Professor’s disgust.

Nickie the Kid was hurt, too, at the scant attendance.

He had been acknowledged by experts to be the best Link ever exhibited in Australia, and Links included all sorts of hairy freaks, wild men of the woods, and shaggy eccentrics from Borneo; but Nicholas Crips could not rest satisfied as a mere interpreter of monkey character.

Nickie reached out and developed, and his newest device was a dinner in the cage, an actual dinner, in which Madame Marve, bewitchingly dressed in a costume that was a cross between the uniform of a hospital nurse and the garb of a French peasant girl, acted as waitress, and the Missing Link figured as the diner.  Actual edibles were used, and a “practicable” bottle of beer.

This turn gave the Living Skeleton great concern.  “I wish yer wouldn’t do it, Nickie,” said Matty, from his pedestal next the cage of the Missing Link.  “Et’s awful tryin’ to a pore bloke what ain’t ‘ad nothin’ fer dinner but a dry biscuit t’ ’ave ’t sit ’ere, patient as an owl, while you’re hoggin’ into ther grub, an’ pourin’ fresh beer into yersell regardless iv expense.”

“Get out,” replied the Missing Link.  “Call yourself an artist.  Every pro. has to suffer for his art.  You have to suffer for yours, going short in your eating so as to keep in proper condition.  You wouldn’t have a fellow artist sacrifice his chance of becoming celebrated just because it isn’t quite pleasant to you to be a spectator at the banquet?”