CHAPTER II.
THE LEGEND OF BARÒLIN.
"Ah!" Frank Hallett drew a long breath and stood in silent thought for a minute or more, Elsie watching him all the time saying nothing. The interest, half indignant, half admiring, and with a dash of the humorous in it, which Elsie's account of the sticking up of the Goondi coach and the robbery of the miser-millionaire had excited, faded suddenly, and gave way to a more personal and absorbing excitement. Moonlight's depredations were certainly a mystery and a shame to the district, and to a Government which was supposed to protect the property of peaceable colonists. But the Luya squatters had got into a way of looking upon Moonlight's misdeeds as not calling for very serious vengeance. He did not bail up their stations or steal their valuable cattle and horses, or frighten helpless women or respected inhabitants. There was, indeed, a certain odd chivalry and daredevilry of the Claude Duval kind in this masked miscreant with the soft voice and courteous manners, who flashed out on moonlight nights to stick up a gold escort and then disappeared into the bowels of the earth, as it seemed, or into the thickets of Baròlin Scrub. It was Moonlight's picturesqueness which appealed to the romantic element in more prosaic natures than that of Elsie Valliant. If truth were told, Frank Hallett was not inclined to judge too harshly a bandit who, granted that he robbed, robbed "on the square." No, it was not of Moonlight that he was thinking, but of the fact suddenly borne in upon him that Mr. Slaney's removal threw open the constituency of the Luya, and assured him of the opportunity for which he had been waiting, in order to begin his chosen career. In a flash he grasped the personal significance of Elsie Valliant's words. The member for Luya was dead. He himself might now be the member for Luya.
At the same moment a pang of remorse shot through
