The Bathurst-Sydney coach was stuck up at Lapstone Hill by three armed men. The passengers were Michael Duffy, Constable McKay, in charge of a female lunatic, and three Chinamen. After having collected the money from the passengers and searched the letters, the robbers extinguished the coach lamps, took the horses out, and drove them up the hill. The driver waited for half an hour, as he had been ordered to do, and then started to catch his horses. This he managed to do with some difficulty, and on his return he drove on to Penrith. From thence the passengers and the broken mail-bags were taken to Sydney by train. John Forster was arrested in a house at Strawberry Hills, Sydney, and charged with having, with others, stuck up and robbed the mail coach between Penrith and Hartley at two a.m. Ah Lung, one of the passengers on the coach, recognised a sash which the prisoner wore round his waist as his property, and said he carried his money in it. Forster was sent to gaol for ten years. About this time great excitement was caused throughout New South Wales by the report that Frank Gardiner had been discovered and arrested by Detective McGlone on March 3rd, at Apis Creek, on the road from Rockhampton to the Peak Downs diggings, Queensland. Gardiner was keeping a shanty, or roadside store, with Mrs. Brown, who passed as his wife. Gardiner was brought to Sydney and duly committed for trial. In connection with this case Mr. (afterwards Sir) E. Deas Thompson laid a return on the table of the Legislative Assembly showing that the amount stolen by Gardiner previous to his disappearance was about £21,000. Of this total, £13,694 had been stolen in the robbery of the Lachlan Escort, and £5335 had been recovered by the police under Sir Frederick Pottinger. No murders were charged against Gardiner, but he was convicted on three counts for highway robbery. On each of these counts he was sentenced, on the first to twelve years and on the other two to ten years each. The first three years in irons in each case. The sentences were made cumulative, and aggregated thirty-two years. It will be remembered that Captain Melville, the bushranger, was sentenced to a similar term of imprisonment in Victoria about twelve years before, and there were many people in New South Wales who thought that Gardiner had been too harshly dealt with. Such a sentence, they said, deprived a man of all hope, and rendered him desperate, and they would not be surprised if Gardiner rebelled against it as Melville had done. Those who held this view were, however, in the minority. The majority said bushranging must be stamped out at any cost, and until this was effected the sentences could not be too severe.