"I got off all right, and the moon was as clear as day, and everything just ripe for sticking a chap up. Then, like a fool, having a longish time to wait, I didn’t simply stop in shadow behind a tree-trunk or something in the usual way, but thought I’d do a thing I’d never heard of bushrangers doing, though Indian thugs are pretty good at it. I went and got up a tree which has a branch over the road, and I thought I’d drop down almost on top of Frenchy to start with. And that’s just what I did do, only I dropped wrong, and came down pretty nearly on my head owing to slipping somehow at the start. What did exactly happen to me as I left the tree I never shall know. Anyway, Frenchy came along sure enough, and I dropped, and he jumped I should think fully a yard in the air; but that was all, because in falling I hit a big root (it was a beech-tree), and went and broke something in my ankle and something in my chest and couldn’t stand. Consequently, of course, I couldn’t stick him up. The pain was pretty fair, but feeling what a fool I was seemed to make me forget it. Anyway, finding it was useless to think of sticking him up, I tried to hobble into the fern and get out of sight; and finding I couldn’t crawl, I rolled. But of course you can’t roll away from a chap, and he came after me, and my mask fell off while I rolled, and he recognized me. "‘_Mon Dieu!_ it is the boy Maine!’ he said. ‘Speak, child, what in the wide world was this?’ "I disguised my voice and said I wasn’t Maine, and that he’d better leave me alone or it might be the worse for him yet. But he wouldn’t go, and, chancing to get queer about the head somehow I went off, I suppose, though it wasn’t for long. When I came to he was gone, but he rushed back in a minute with that rotten old top-hat he wears full of water he’d got from the puddle in the stone-pit. He doused my head and made me sit up with my back against a tree. Then, feeling the frightfulness of it, I begged him to clear out and let me alone. I said: "‘You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m no friend to you, but the deadliest enemy you’ve got in the world, and if I hadn’t fallen down at a critical moment and broken myself I should have stuck you up, Monsieur Michel. So, now, you know.’ "He said to himself, ‘The poor mad boy--the poor mad boy--I will run _à toutes jambes_ for succor’; but I told him not to. I began to get a rum hot pain in my side then, but I felt I would gladly have died there rather than be obliged to him. I said: "‘You called me an “aborigine,” which is the most terrible thing you can call an Australian-born chap, and you wanted to pass it off with a knife with a corkscrew and tweezers in it. But you couldn’t expect me to take it, feeling as I did. Now the fortunes of war have given you the victory, and, if you please, I wish you’d go.’