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The drays had moved on as he was speaking, and drew up at the door of the inn, for the punt-man to put them across the river; but no one appeared, and we found upon entering that the publican was away, and that the women of the place had locked themselves into one of the rooms. Hearing our voices, and the teams stopping, they ventured out.

'Oh, Bill, is it you?' said the publican's wife to the driver; 'I'm so glad! Send that horrid man away. You know it was him killed Mr. Berridge. I wonder they let him go about that way; he ought to be shot! He knew my husband was away, and the punt-man gone across the river, or he wouldn't have dared to show.'

'He would run very quickly if any of the young Mr. Berridges happened to come this way and catch sight of him,' said the other woman. 'They have often hunted for him.'

I turned to look at the man thus spoken of, and who seemed to be an object of hatred to black and white alike. He was still standing in the middle of the road, where he could command a view up and down and across the river, so that no foe could approach him unobserved. He seemed about twenty-five, slenderly built and tall, and was dressed in a complete suit of cast-off European clothing,—brown linen jacket, trousers, and waistcoat,—so that at a distance he might pass for a European. His eye had that peculiar, watchful, suspicious glance characteristic of the hunted man; it never for a instant ceased to wander over the landscape, except now and then, when he fixed them upon me as I stood with the others in the verandah. He was a good-looking fellow for a black, but there was a dark and desperate expression lurking beneath the appearance of carelessness which he put on under the looks of our party.