who sang a song in the most charming baritone while the travellers were having their supper.
“Do you know who that was?” said Tom’s master when they were once more on their way. “That was Hunt, the accomplice of Thurtell, who murdered a man called Weare. You remember it, do you? Well, that’s the man, and he just bears out what I say: we don’t care a kick what a convict has done in the old country so long as he don’t go doing it again out here. But there, I keep forgetting you’re one yourself; somehow or other you’re not like the rest; and you take my advice, and go on like you’ve begun.” As he paused, the voice of Hunt was wafted to their ears in a new song, that died very sweetly on the soft night air.
The latter stages of the journey were marked by looks of recognition wherever young Sullivan baited his horses, but by never a single look of welcome; and an ominous climax was reached when the little cavalcade passed a stockade and a chain-gang within twenty miles of their destination.—
Here was a long line of heavily ironed men, some eighty in all, strung together like beads on a rosary, and at work with pick and shovel beneath the burning sun and the eyes and muskets of the military. As the riders approached word seemed to go along the line, and face after face was raised with a curse and a howl as the horses passed. Such faces as they were! Tom had not seen the like in Newgate, nor aboard the Seahorse, nor yet, in such a number, in Sydney itself. Those, on the whole, were only on the lower slopes of degradation; but these had reached its lowest depths, and Tom rode by them with an aching heart and averted eyes.
His attention, indeed, became concentrated upon his
