Harry wasn’t expected home until next day. He had been told to sleep at the “Macquarie Arms,” in Jerry’s Town, when he had left his message at the barracks, and come home at his leisure in the morning. About four miles from Wonga-Wonga, the dreariest part of the road to Jerry’s Town—begins a two miles’ stretch of dismal scrub. Harry put his heels into Guardsman’s sides to make him go even faster than he was going when they went into the scrub, and was pleased to hear a horse’s hoofs coming towards him from the other end. He thought it was a neighbour riding home to the next station; but it was Warrigal. As soon as Harry pulled up Guardsman to chat for a minute, Warrigal laid hold of the bridle and pulled Harry on to the saddle before him.
“Let’s see, you’re one of the Wonga-Wonga kids, ain’t you?” said the robber. “And where are you off to at this time of night? Oh! oh! to fetch the traps, I guess; but I’ll stop that little game.”
Just then Harry gave a _coo-ey!_ He couldn’t give a very loud one, for he was lying like a sack on the robber’s horse; but it made Warrigal very savage. He put the cold muzzle of a pistol against Harry’s face, and said,
“You screech again, youngster, and you won’t do it no more.”
And then Warrigal took Harry and the horses into the scrub, and gagged Harry with a bit of iron he took out of his pocket, and bailed him up to a crooked old honeysuckle tree, with a long piece of rope he carried in his saddle-bags.
“Don’t frighten yourself; I’ll tell your Mar where you are, and you’ll be back by breakfast,” said Warrigal, as he got on Guardsman, driving his own tired horse before him.
It wasn’t pleasant for a little boy to be tied tight to an ugly old tree in that lonely place, and to hear the curlews wailing just as the bushrangers call to one another, and the laughing jackasses hooting before daylight, as if they were making fun of him. But what vexed brave little Harry most was that he hadn’t been able to get to the police.
Next morning, just as day was breaking, Warrigal and his two mates, with crape masks on, rode up to Wonga-Wonga. I don’t know which were the bigger cowards, those three great fellows going to bully a lady and a boy, or the half-dozen and more of great fellows about the place who they knew would let them do it. They made as little noise as they could, but the dogs began to bark, and woke Sydney. When he woke, however, Warrigal had got his little window open, and was covering him with his pistol. Sydney put out his hand for his revolver, and though Warrigal shouted, “Throw up your hands, boy, or I’ll shoot you through the head,” he jumped out of bed and fired. He missed Warrigal, and Warrigal missed him, but Warrigal’s bullet knocked Sydney’s revolver out of his hand, and one of Warrigal’s mates made a butt at the bedroom door and smashed it, and he and Warrigal (were they not heroes?) rushed into the room, and threw Sydney down on the bed, and pinioned his arms with a sheet. The other bushranger was watching the horses. By this time the whole station was aroused. The men peeped out of their huts, half frightened and half amused; not one of them came near the house. John Jones and his wife piled their boxes against their room-door, and then crept under the bed. Miss Smith went into hysterics, and Gertrude and her sisters couldn’t help looking as white as their night-dresses, though they tried hard to show Miss Smith how much braver native girls were than English, even if they did not know so much French, and Use of the Globes, and Mangnall’s Questions. Mrs. Lawson had fired off her blunderbuss, but it had only broken two panes of the parlour-window, and riddled the verandah-posts; so Wonga-Wonga was at the bushrangers’ mercy.