‘This man has been shot from the front, Greffham, shouldn’t you say?’ pronounced the clear, incisive tones of Mr. Merlin. ‘He may or may not have been standing up to his assassin. If so, it was a species of duel, and the best shot and quickest had it. If you wouldn’t care about standing there, now, by that oak-tree, raise your arm, so; by Jove, you would be just in the position that the man must been in that dropped the poor sergeant.’ ‘Just the sort of thing that Greffham would have gone in for if he was hard up,’ said Mr. Bright, chuckling. He was reckless as to the flavour of his jests, far from particular if only they were ‘hot’ enough. ‘You are always thinking of that gold-buyer of yours that was shot, Bright,’ said Greffham, wincing uneasily, though, under the concentrated gaze of three remarkably steady pairs of eyes,―Merlin’s, Bright’s, and Markham’s. ‘It’s my belief that Halliday shot himself; he was something like you, in always carrying half a bushel of revolvers, and, like your battery, it went off accidentally sometimes.’ ‘There’s a boot mark in the sand underneath that oak-tree,’ said Markham, with great suavity; ‘it’s the very model of your track, Mr. Greffham, that you made there. Excuse _me_, sir.’ ‘I suppose other people wear boots as well as I,’ he said. ‘Bushmen and diggers are deuced rough, and all that, but they haven’t come to going barefoot yet.’ ‘Nor wearing French boots with very narrow heels,’ said Markham, as he measured the imprint of the said _bottine_ with a small pocket rule. ‘However, boots don’t go for much, unless corroborated.’ With this sapient speech Mr. Markham closed his remarks and apparently lost interest in the scene. ‘Now this poor fellow,’ interpolated Mr. Merlin, lifting up the trooper’s face, and parting the thickly clustering brown curls, ‘has been shot from _behind_. Here’s the little hole through the back of his head, and the pistol must have been pretty close, as the powder has burned one side of it considerably. He has simply fallen over on his face, and there was an end of him. Here you can see where the valise containing the gold and notes was unstrapped from Sergeant Carroll’s saddle. The saddles had been put back to back on the ground. One carbine is here still, and one is missing.’ ‘By Jove!’ said Greffham, ‘you know everything, Merlin. You’re like the man in the _Arabian Nights_ who described the camel that had passed the day before,―lame, blind of an eye, having lost two front teeth, and loaded half with rice and half with dates, and yet never saw him at all. You’re a wonderful fellow! You’re so devilish sharp.’