Nickie thirst had been nagging at him for two hours past.  He always contended that the Missing Link’s skin was provocative of a great drought.  He pleaded with Matty, the bone man, appealing artfully to his professional pride, for Bonypart loved to feel in exalted moments that his position as the living skeleton was not insignificant after all.

“We can slip on overcoats, trot over to the Bridge Inn, have a drink, and return before the Professor wakes.” whispered Nickie.

“I couldn’t trust meself near th’ counter-lunch.  Nickie.  I couldn’t,” Mat replied.

But in the end the Missing Link had his way.  Bonypart pulled on trousers and coat over his tawdry tights, Nickie turned back the ingenious head-piece and mask of Mahdi, the man-monkey, so that it hung between his shoulders, donned an overcoat and a pair of the Professor’s knee boots, and the two slipped under the tent, and made for Peter’s Bridge Inn, on the outskirts of a dusty township.

An hour later the Missing Link and the Living Skeleton were sitting under the pile bridge a mile above the township, with a bottle of whisky between them.  Bonypart was eating bread and cheese with an avidity which demonstrated the abandonment of all professional instincts.  Nicholas Crips was drinking whisky slightly diluted with creek water.  His drinking cup was a rusty sardine tin.

Two hours later the Living Skeleton and Mahdi, the man-monkey, snored side by side in the shade of the bridge, the creek rippled at their feet, the sun blazed on the bushland on the left and right, and the whisky bottle stood between them.

Meanwhile, Professor Thunder’s Museum of Marvels was decorated with a placard, reading: 

“Closed on account of illness in the family.”

Professor Thunder himself was racing about the township and through the surrounding scrub, seeking his missing exhibits, fearing the worst, and promising himself the satisfaction of a terrible vengeance when he laid hands on the recreant pair.  He knew that Nickie had gone off in his skin as the Missing Link, and realised the danger of a possible exposure.  To communicate his loss to the people of ’Tween Bridge would practically mean giving the game away.  At the inn he had been given a description of the two strangers who had refreshed themselves with three long beers, and then bought a bottle of whisky and certain edibles, and taken the road to One Tree Hill.  Thunder recognised the description, and his language shocked Peters, the publican, who had once been a sinner and the champion bullock driver of the Western District.

“Bread and cheese!” groaned the Professor, as he thrashed about in the scrub.  “That Living Skeleton ’ll be as fat as a pig.”

At about ten o’clock that night Dan Reynolds, riding from One Tree Hill to ’Tween Bridges, and thinking of Annie, the Cockie’s daughter, whom he had left at the slip-rails, was amazed at a terrible apparition that arose before him on the moon-lit road.  It was a strange, shaggy creature, half monkey half-man, covered from the top of his head to the knees in thick, crisp, tufted hair.