"Then who stole your powder-flask, and drew the bullets out of your pistols?" asked Brinsmead. "Not the man you speak of, certainly," said Jack. "I looked at the priming of my pistols this morning, and they were all right, though to be sure, not thinking that they might have been tampered with, I did not examine the charges. However, he could not have done it while riding alongside of me. In what state did you find your pistols, Brinsmead?" "I must own, Jack, they would not go off either; and yet I did this morning what I always do, examine them before starting, when I have my master's property to defend upon the road." "But did you never lose sight of them after you had examined them?" asked Deane. Brinsmead thought a few moments. "Yes, I remember now, for once I did; and now I think of it, I remember seeing a man, very like the fellow who has just left us, watching me as I went out. That's it, depend on it." While Brinsmead was speaking, he pulled out his pistols and examined them with his ramrod. The charge of both had been withdrawn. He put them back into his holsters with a look of annoyance. "Ah! these are old tricks, and more shame to me I was not up to them; but now, for the sake of the poor fellows we have got here, we must push on as fast as we can get the drove over this mud and these mortally bad roads. There's a house called Winn's Farm about three miles off from here, where we shall be able to get good pasturage, and the men will be well looked after." Pushing on, in the course of another hour the drove approached Winn's Farm which had been spoken of, when Deane walked on before that he might explain to the farmer what had happened, and make arrangements for remaining there during the night. The names of Mr Strelley of Nottingham and his old drover were well-known along the road, and accordingly a kindly welcome was given to the whole party. The kine were turned into some good grazing-ground, and the wounded drovers were carefully placed on a bed, and their hurts looked to by Dame Winn, the farmer's wife. The good woman prided herself on her surgical knowledge, having received instructions from her mother, who in her younger days had had unhappily, during the Civil Wars, too much opportunity of gaining experience in the art of attending to gunshot wounds. "We must have better laws, Master Brinsmead; these sort of things cannot be allowed in the country," observed Farmer Winn, when his guests were seated round his hospitable board, at which all his family, as well as the drovers and his old farm-servants, were also assembled. "I have suffered from some of these caterans from the north, so I have a fellow-feeling with you, I can tell you."