The party, now become a procession, moved quietly homeward to Turonia. They halted at the inn, the landlord of which was considerably surprised at seeing the great Mr. Greffham’s hands closed before him, while a trooper led his horse by a rein. Up to this period he had not the smallest suspicion that the lavish swell, who, like all men who affected wholesale piracy, was ‘quite the gentleman’ in the matter of free spending of money, could be possibly mixed up with a cold-blooded murder and an extensive robbery. But now his intellect being permitted freedom, he remembered that Mr. Greffham had called at his inn at no long time after the troopers, one of whom he knew well, and furthermore that he remembered hearing a shot at a great distance. It might have been a revolver. He could not say. It was firearms of some sort. Might have been two shots. Saw nothing. Ernest observed that Markham noted down in a large pocket-book the exact minute and hour of the faint report of firearms to which the innkeeper testified, the exact time at which the troopers were last seen alive by him, and the time of the arrival of Greffham; and those minor matters being definitely settled, Mr. Merlin conducting the interrogation in a very different voice from his society one, the subdued, if not noticeably saddened procession took the road for Turonia. It was late when they reached that somewhat peculiar settlement, but the streets were profusely lighted, busy, and more thronged than at noonday. When the modern inland Australian substitute for ‘a plump of spears beneath a pennon gay’ rode straight for the camp, the foremost trooper leading the horse of a manacled prisoner, whom many keen eyes at once recognised as Lionel Greffham, a low but savage murmur came from the dense and excited crowd. Whatever interest or enthusiasm might have been evoked in Mr. Neuchamp’s breast by the wonders and novelties of the great goldfield and its heterogeneous, picturesque population, had now collapsed. A feeling of doubt and horror succeeded. A tinge of blood, a brooding death-shadow, was over the splendour and the glamour of the enormous treasure-pile which now in ceaseless, countless profusion seemed daily won from the reluctant earth. He heard to his great satisfaction that Mr. Banks and his party had arrived; that Levison’s manager, a man of boundless experience in stock, more particularly cattle, was already hard at work at the muster, and that every day an increasing number of the female cattle destined for Rainbar was drafted and delivered to the ‘tailing mob’ in Mr. Banks’s charge. Satisfying himself by inspection that the very ordinary routine work of mustering a herd, when the mere numbers and sex were alone concerned, and where no battles had to be fought over individuals of disputed age, size, or quality, could be very safely delegated to subordinates, Ernest rode over to Branksome Hall for a farewell visit.