Unaccountably enough Bradby went no further than the dying embers of the fire. His first act was to build a big blaze, for he was already becoming afraid. He could not define even to himself just what this fear was; it was not so much horror at what he had done as a feeling that his sins would yet find him out. Some strange attraction kept him close to the scene of the tragedy, and all night he sat by the fire with his head in his hands and his eyes staring at the ever-widening ring of white ashes. Towards morning he fell into a doze, but scarcely had the first rays of the sun penetrated through the leafy mantle of the trees than he was wide-awake. There were dark rings under his eyes, and the eyes themselves looked strangely tired and haggard. He glanced at his hands with a faint idea that something had been wrong with them the night before. He was disgusted to find that they were caked with dried blood, and a feeling almost akin to nausea shook his frame. He made all the haste he could to the creek and washed every speck of blood and dirt off, so that when he had finished his hands were clean and spotless.

He shot a parrot for breakfast and made a gruesome meal off the raw flesh. There was nothing else to eat, for the flour had all been finished the previous day. After the morning's meal he brightened up and set off northward with a brisk stride. The money was safe enough in the valley for the present, he decided, and a couple of months in the Riverina would not only not do him any harm, but would allow the hue and cry time to die down. After that he would come back and get the gold, and this time there would be no question of division; it would be his, all of it. Now that the daylight had come he could think of the dark figure suddenly growing limp in his arms and the smell of fresh blood mixing with the scent of the wattles without the slightest misgiving. He had no fear of it; he certainly felt no remorse. The further he got from the scene of the murder, the lighter grew his spirits. He turned the situation over in his mind and found abundant satisfaction in it; his primitive logic told him that there was no evidence against him.

It is doubtful who was the most surprised, the troopers or Bradby when he stumbled unexpectedly into their camp that evening. They were not the men who had been following the bushrangers from the start, but another body, warned by wire and hurriedly sent out from Murtoa. For some unexplained reason the camp-fire had been allowed to die down, and so there was no red glow to warn Bradby of their proximity. He had blundered into the midst of the men before he quite realised what had happened, and, when he made a wild dash for safety, he found that all way of escape had been cut off. He was hemmed in on every side. The troop was in charge of an officer of more than average intelligence, and he instantly jumped to the correct conclusion. Had Bradby not lost his head and endeavored to escape, he might have been able to pass himself off as a prospector or something of the sort, but the mere sight of his all-too-evident anxiety to get away wakened the suspicions of the sergeant. The Grampians and the country surrounding them had hitherto been singularly free from crime, and no malefactors from other parts of the State were known to be at large in that neighbourhood. Obviously this man, who displayed such a disinclination to meet the police, must be a criminal, and just as obviously must he be one of the men wanted for the gold escort robbery. The sergeant decided in one lightning flash on a plan that he hoped would startle the man into betraying himself. The moment Bradby turned to retreat and found himself hemmed in, the other walked over to him, scrutinised him carefully, and in the same instant placed his hand on his shoulder and said, "I arrest you in the Queen's name for the robbery of the Gold Escort on the night of 1st December."

Bradby's jaw dropped and he stared open-mouthed at the other. He could not understand the process of almost instantaneous reasoning by which the officer had arrived at this conclusion, and the swift scrutiny the man had given him convinced him that in some strange and unaccountable way a description of him had been obtained and circulated. The man had recognised him, of that he felt sure.

All round him were staring policemen, watching him intently with eyes that were no less full of astonishment than his own. They could not fathom the reasons that actuated their chief, but they realised, all of them, that the man before them must be in some guilty way connected with the robbery. His very manner told them that.

The chief uttered the usual warning: "It is my duty to warn you that anything you say will be used in evidence——" He got so far when Bradby awoke from his stupor. He gave no warning of his intention, but his doubled fist shot out, caught the other on the point of the jaw and dropped him in a heap on the ground. Then with the swiftness of thought he leaped to one side, pulling his revolver loose at the same instant. He had just the smallest fraction of a second's start of the police, and in the flurry of the moment he actually burst through the cordon that had formed around him. The next instant the carbines of the police commenced to bark. Bradby stumbled, recovered himself, and fired over his shoulder. Several of the troopers were already on horseback, and it was only a matter of riding him down. He saw this himself, and his futile shot was designed to stop one at least of the horses. However, it went wide. He slipped behind a tree and began snap-shooting at the advancing mounted men. They spread out fanwise, thus coming at him from three sides at once. He moved slightly in order to get a better aim, and in doing so unwittingly exposed himself. One of the troopers, who had discarded his carbine in favor of a revolver, took a flying shot. Bradby lurched from behind the tree, clasped his hands to his left side and slipped down on to the grass.

When they reached him the blood was welling out of his side, and they saw that he was mortally wounded. The man who had fired the fatal shot dropped on his knees beside him and lifted up his head. Bradby's face was ashy pale, even in the faint moonlight one could see that, but he was still conscious.

"It's no use," he panted. "I'm done."

"Where is the gold and where are your mates?" the man asked, conscious that a word from the dying bushranger would solve everything. Bradby's frame shook spasmodically, and when the other looked again there was blood on his pale lips.

"Through the lung," muttered one of the others who had some knowledge of medical science.

The first man repeated his question in another form.

Bradby looked at him with a strangely inscrutable face and with eyes that were already darkening with the shadow of death.

"Where's the gold? Where's ... my ... mates?" The last three words were almost whispered.

"Yes," said the trooper eagerly. "Where are they?"

The dying man moved his lips, but no sound issued from them. The other bent down closer to him.

"That," said the bushranger with long and painful pauses between each word, "you ... will ... never ... know."

And with that last taunt on his lips he died.

"Game to the end," the trooper said to his comrades with an admiration he made no effort to hide.

The blow had not killed Abel Cumshaw. He lay unconscious for the better part of the night, and even when the day dawned he was too weak at first to do more than crawl a few paces at the most. His head was throbbing, his mouth was a raging furnace, and all his limbs felt as if they had been racked and twisted. When daylight came at length he lay still for a while, trying to recollect what had happened. But his mind was a perfect blank and he himself was a man without an identity. The blow that had knocked him unconscious had somehow affected his memory, and he knew no more about himself than he did about the man in the moon. Something terrible had happened, something in which he had played a very prominent part, that much he realised; but beyond that simple fact his recollection did not extend. He groped about in the grass in the hope that he might find something that would give him a clue to the situation. His hand fell on his revolver. That at least was tangible, but there was nothing enlightening about it. Further search revealed a small flat piece of wood. He picked it up curiously and stared at it. Two or three sentences had been hurriedly scratched on its smooth surface with the point of a sharp knife, but though they were intelligible enough they did not appear to refer to anything concerning him. The mere fact that he had been lying almost on top of the wood struck him as strange, and in a moment of unusual thoughtfulness he slipped it into his pocket.

It was bright day by then, and the warmth of the sun seemed to revive him to a marvellous extent. He got on his feet more by sheer will-power than by any sudden accession of strength. He found that he could stagger along, though his pace was necessarily slow and his course very erratic. Some uncharted sense, instinct perhaps, led him along the track to the creek where he had pitched his camp the previous evening. There was a dim familiarity about the place that puzzled him. He felt in some absurd way that he should recognise it, and he was both angry and surprised that he could not. He found the remains of the parrot that Bradby had eaten for breakfast, and he wondered vaguely who the man might be who had been so close to him that morning. His wonder was such an impersonal thing that he did not connect his own condition with the fact of the other man's presence. Something had given way inside his head, that something that controlled rational and consecutive memory. He sat down on the bank of the creek and gazed into space. It would be incorrect to say that he was dazed or that he behaved like a man in a dream. Those are stock terms that in themselves are quite inadequate to convey his peculiar state of mind and body. It was something more than lassitude, yet it was not quite fatigue. It was rather as if some integral part of his brain had been removed.

It is impossible to say just how long he remained on the bank of the creek. At last his hunger became so acute that he determined to go off foraging. He had his revolver with him; he was a fair enough shot, and so it was not long before he tumbled a 'possum out of a tree. He made a rough meal of it, and after that set off aimlessly into the bush. Had he kept to his original intention he would have speedily wandered into the Mallee, and would have run a good chance of dying of starvation in that thinly-populated district. But his mind was still in a whirl, and instinct alone guided his footsteps to the east. He was many miles north of the valley and during his travels he moved further north, so that he did not come across it during his journey back.

His subsequent adventures are not very clear. Early in his travels the piece of wood began to trouble him, and he decided that the sooner he got rid of it the better. It is more than likely that he connected it in some way with that blank feeling of inexplicable tragedy which seemed to overshadow him. His instinct, however, led him to hide rather than destroy it. He read the wording very carefully, but it failed to awaken any responsive chords in his memory. As an after-thought, just as he was about to slide the wood into the hole he had scraped out, he took his knife and cut his name below the screed. Then he thrust it into the hole and stamped the earth in on top of it. In this relation it is interesting to notice the connection between the hiding of the money and the burying of the wood that held the key to the position of the former. It seems as if the sub-conscious memory of the one act had its influence on the man in his performance of the other.

Thereafter Mr. Cumshaw simply disappeared off the face of the earth. His son's story is that he went to New South Wales, married there and raised a family, and in the light of subsequent events that seems to be what most likely occurred. It is known, however, that the Cumshaws were in Victoria again somewhere about nineteen hundred and two or three, Albert being at that time seven years old.

With the lapse of years Abel had gradually recovered his memory, and bit by bit most of the incidents of the robbery had stolen out of the shrouded darkness of the past. He appears to have been perfectly contented with his family, and for one reason and another the gold remained undisturbed through the long years. The time was coming when the old play would be staged again and new actors would arise to carry it through.

The tale of the gold robbery and the shooting of Mr. Jack Bradby, as the reader will readily understand, passed into the police records and thus became matters of history. Though no definite statement has been left us, Mr. Bryce must have first come across the story during his researches into Victorian history. He had friends in the Department, and it is quite feasible that he had ready access to many official documents that are usually beyond the reach of the ordinary public. He was not the only one in this enviable position. There were other students of the past who were moving along the same lines, and as he pieced together the puzzle of the robbery he was followed by a pair of agile, unscrupulous brains every whit as clever as he. The police records told Mr. Bryce just this much:—On the first day of December, 1881, there had been a gold robbery, and the robbers had got completely away. They had been followed, and subsequently a man had been killed in the Grampians who had been identified as John Bradby, a noted sheep and cattle-duffer. When dying he refused to tell who his pals were, and had in the same breath stated that the police would never find the gold. That in itself was conclusive, yet the additional fact remained that the whereabouts of the gold was still as big a mystery as ever it had been. The opinion of the police was that the other members of the gang—they seemed to think that it was a fairly large one—had returned when the hue and cry had died away and recovered the plunder. Bryce, reading between the lines of the dry official record, rather thought that they hadn't. At any rate the element of mystery was sufficiently strong to induce him to investigate the matter further. That was really the beginning of the trouble.