“No, we won’t wait,” said Hugh angrily. “We will be off home now, and send a man for them. And I advise you to be very careful, Mick Donohoe, for I have my own idea who dug up that fence.”
“Well, you don’t suppose that I done it, do you?” said Red Mick. “I’ve been in the house this three days. Besides, I wouldn’t steal my brother-in-law’s sheep, anyhow. Won’t ye come up, and have a dhrink of tea now, you and the lady? It’s terrible hot.”
“No, thank you,” said Hugh stiffly. “Come along, Miss Grant.” And they marched off towards the horses.
“It beats all who could have took them posts down, doesn’t it?” said Mick. “I’d offer a reward, if I was you. Them fellows about here would steal the eyes out of your head. Good day to ye, Mr. Hugh.”
And the cockatoo added, “Good-bye, Cockie,” in a sepulchral voice, as they trudged off, smitten hip and thigh.
Hugh was suffering intensely at his defeat, and when Mary Grant said, “I suppose you will have him put in gaol at once?” he muttered that he would have to think it over. “It wouldn’t do to prosecute him and fail, and we have no proof that he dug up the fence.”
“But why did he say that the sheep belonged to his brother-in-law?”
Hugh started. “Did he say that? Well, he—he must have wanted to make out that he did not know whose sheep they were” but he thought to himself, “Is Red Mick going to bring up that old scandal?”
Mick, as he watched them go, winked twice to himself, and then stooped and patted the head of the collie pup. The other dogs, in answer to a silent wave of his hand, had slunk off quietly. The riders had disappeared. It had been a narrow escape, and Red Mick knew it; and even as things had turned out, there was still ample chance of a conviction.
On the way back to the homestead Hugh began to talk of the chance of a conviction, and the delight it would be to give Mick seven years, but his ideas were disturbed by thoughts of Mick’s face as he said, “Why should I steal my brother-in-law’s sheep?” He looked at the girl alongside him, and prayed that the old story might never be resurrected.
The question whether Mick Donohoe should be prosecuted was not likely to be prejudiced by his claim of kinship. Billy the Bully would as soon prosecute his own brother-in-law as anybody else—sooner, in fact. So Hugh, having reached home very crest-fallen and angry, wrote a full account of the affair in his report of the station work, and asked whether he should lay an information.