Page 364 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

with accidents? How, in the devil’s name, you let the man
get over the wall, I don’t know.’
‘He ran up that stone heap,’ says Scott, ‘and seemed to me
to jump at the roof of the shed. I fired at him, and he swung
his legs over the top of the wall and dropped.’
Frere measured the distance from his eye, and an irre-
pressible feeling of admiration, rising out of his own skill in
athletics, took possession of him for an instant.
‘By the Lord Harry, but it’s a big jump!’ he said; and then
the instinctive fear with which the consciousness of the hid-
eous wrong he had done the now escaped convict inspired
him, made him add: ‘A desperate villain like that wouldn’t
stick at a murder if you pressed him hard. Which way did
he go?’
‘Right up Macquarie Street, and then made for the moun-
tain. There were few people about, but Mr. Mays, of the Star
Hotel, tried to stop him, and was knocked head over heels.
He says the fellow runs like a deer.’
‘We’ll have the reward out if we don’t get him to-night,’
says Frere, turning away; ‘and you’d better put on an extra
warder. This sort of game is catching.’ And he strode away
to the Barracks.
From right to left, from east to west, through the prison
city flew the signal of alarm, and the patrol, clattering out
along the road to New Norfolk, made hot haste to strike
the trail of the fugitive. But night came and found him yet
at large, and the patrol returning, weary and disheartened,
protested that he must be lying hid in some gorge of the
purple mountain that overshadowed the town, and would