"I don't like it," persisted Denis. "I played a trick on him, but I never thought it would turn out like this. I thought we should spend months doing what we've after all had done for us." He raised his brooding eyes from the ground, and there was the buggy still in view, labouring in and out among the tents. "Jimmy, you stay on the claim!" he cried, and dashed after it on the spur of the moment. "What's happened?" asked the late sinker, pleasantly. "We haven't forgotten anything, have we?" "No, but I have," panted Denis, "and if you can help me I'll be as grateful again to you. There's a chum of ours who left us only this morning. He was sick of it; but he little knew the luck that was in store for us. His name's Moseley, and he was going home in the first ship, which will be your ship, but you will probably overtake him on the road to-night." "What's he like?" asked the spectacled gentleman, who no longer drove; and when Denis told him he was sure he had met Moseley in the forenoon, and felt confident of recognizing him again. "Then will you tell him exactly what has happened to us, and that he shall come in on the old shares if only he'll come back? Say we changed our mind about Bendigo; and say we must be two men and a boy, and we'd far rather he was the other man than some stranger, especially if there's a fortune in it. Tell him there probably is; and if you will tell it him all from his friend, Denis Dent, gentlemen, I can't say how grateful I shall be to you!" Denis had an odd reward for his trouble and this outburst. The tall digger shook hands with him for the first and last time. But the climax of the business was to come long before Moseley's answer. Denis had not been five minutes absent, yet on his return to the new claim it was surrounded by a fringe of diggers embellished by a posse of mounted men in spruce uniform. "What on earth is it?" cried Denis, rushing up in alarm. "The old story," answered a digger. "Joe! Joe! Joe!" "Traps," added another; but Denis had not been on the diggings two months without learning the meaning of both words. Either was the diggers' danger signal, and signified a raid by the police in search of their licenses; in fact, that very sport whose praises Lieutenant Rackham had sung in the ear of his old crony Captain Devenish. And it was Rackham who led the present field; dismounted, he had run his man to earth in the bark-roofed hut; and his man was no more of a man than the unfortunate Doherty, who was clinging tooth and nail to the door-post, while Rackham himself, a full-blooded negro in his rage, tugged like a terrier at his ankles. "Stick to it, little 'un!" cried one in good-humoured encouragement. "If you don't, the claim'll be jumped afore your mate gets back." "Hold your row," growled another with an oath. "It's a fine deep hole, and I have a jolly good mind to jump it myself." Denis burst through them at that moment.