The Swoop of the Vulture.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10714, 20 September 1912, Page 2

The Swoop of the Vulture.

'OUR SEfcIAL.)

CHA'PTER XV. (Continued.) Tu two or three minutes the change was completed, then Halkinc ordered him to sit down, took a pair of scissors from the governor's dressing table, and verycarefully clipped off the mustache, and chin beard. Then he melted some more of the giitta percha to a fluid, mixed it with a, little powdered resin, smeared it over his upper lip and chin, and with Wonderful neatness transplanted the warders beard to his own face, leaving the man in the scrubby condition of a clipped convict. He put on .the peaked cap, and waited until the gutta percha cooled and Solidified, when he was quite satisfied with Jiis disguise. he turned to the convict-clad warder, and said:

"Now, then, Halkine, the bell will ring in a few minutes. It's time we were getting back. >Como 'along.',' Plunkett rose mechanically to attention, accepting iho other name without question. Haline fastened the mask and goggles on him, unlocked the door, and marchedhim out He took him back into the prison, saw him safely into his own cell, and locked him in. Then he strolled quietly through the prison yard, walked through the gates with a nod to the gatekeeper, and in a few mimics' more had disappeared amid the thickly driven snow. He had timed matters so that a good two hours elapsed before the audacious trick was discovered. The early dusk of the Northern winter afternoon was deepened by the ever increasing clouds of snowflakes, which fell quickly and softly out of the universal gray mist which covered the heavens. The prison boll was rung, and the telegraph set to work, but any idea of search tha night was mad.ness, and all the infuriated governor and the bewildered officials could do was to wire descriptions of the escaped convict to the surrounding police satiops, and to wait with what patien!i i '>u'd ('Hiimand until morning.

i - , u'-hen morning came, mid the seareii parties were preparing to set out, a greengrocer's cart came laboring through the snow to the door of the prison, and in it lay the body of -Tenner Halkinc, which a shepherd had found almost covered. with snow and frozen stiff by the side of the old roincii i-oad across the moors, about five miles east from the prison. Doctor Saunderson examined the body, and pronounced life to be extinct. The usual inquest was held in the afternoon, and, in accordance with custom, the fact of the death was telegraphed to his sister and his neice. so that they might claim the body, and arrange for the funeral, if thev chose to do so.

The following day Halkine's sister, accompanied l»y his-old friend, Doctor Iznh-Kamal, readied the prison with a closed carriage and a hearse containing an '.'lnpty coffin, which they had procured from the neighbouring town of Xethcrmoor. went through the formalities necessary to (claiming the body, and took it away to the railway station.

CHAPTER XVI. HEDLEY SIEMENS. "What a lovely ivoman! Who is she?" "She. my dear Siemens? Why, do yon mean to tell me that you have been back in the wilds of Australia all this time without knowing the beautiful Mrs Enstono?" "What Enstone:'" asked the first speaker, with a, visible start, as though 'his companion's words had suddenly reawakened some long-sleep-ing memory, as, indeed they had, for his thoughts instantly fled back through nearly twenty years.

The exquisitely furnished, softly illuminated London drawing-room well filled with some of the smartest men and women in the town, men whose names were for the most part as well known in the columns of the newspapers and magazines as they were in the far-away outpost's of the empire, and women, whose beauty, wealth, or wit, and often all throe, had made them famous —suddenly faded away. * * * * * ->;- * # A man. gaunt, haggard, with a skin "like wrinkled brown leather, clothed in rags, and with eyes burning unnaturally bright with the first madness of hunger and thirst, was standing "beside the prostrate body of another man, wlio was lying on the bare rough, sunbaked sand and rubble, in the shade, such as it was, of a scanty patch of wattle scrub at the foot of a gray, round-topped hill, which reared itself about a thousand feet above the ghastly solitude of that miserable wilderness which the Australians havo

BY OWEN MASTERS.

Author of "His Heart's Desire," "One Impassioned Hour," "Captain Kmlyu's bride," "Tho Ikveretl Heritage," "The Ironmaster's Cauguter," etc.

' aptly called the land of Nevei-Xever. j A horse iiad just fallen to tiie ■ ground., within u few feet of the dying . man. and was lying with glazing ey«K and wide-open mouth, giving cut its | life in long., gutural sighs, which vat- ; tied and grated deep down in its ! throat. Near it stood a nude, its logs wide apart, and its head imaging down almost between its forelegs. Ho saw the standing man stoop over tho fallen one, take his water bottle, tobaeco pouch, arid a pocketbook. He looked at the dying man, then at the water bottle, unscrewed the top, put it to his parched lips, and drained the last few precious drops of muddy fluid that it contained, j Then he dropped it beside his com- | rndo, mid went to t.lie horse. He took what little food there was left in the saddlebags, and a little, leather bag containing between two and three pounds of pure gold dust. He slung these on the saddle of his. fainting mule, passed his arm through the bridle, and, without so much as another look at the man believed to bo dead, trudged away with long, dragging strides toward the south-east-ward, pulling the staggering mule after him. * * * * * * * # He had seen all this in one of those swift flashes of memory which pass through the human brain as rapidly as tho electric thrill passes along tiie wire. His companion only noticed a little pause during which his right hand made a couple of strokes down the two sides of the long, silken, black mustache which shaded and disguised the sharply cut, pitiless lips of the man who, for all he knew, had left his friend and comrade to dio in the wilderness more than twenty years before. He had done it just for the sake of those feAv drops of water and the few mouthfuls of food which had made for him the difference between a little heap of bleaching bones in tho solitudes of the Australian desert, and the man who was standing that evening in the drawing-room of Lady Georgina Pontifex, in the big comer house in Grosvenor Square, facing Buckingham Palace Gardens—Hedley Siemens, * millionaire twenty times over, absolute owner of a patch of desert ground twenty miles square, in the midst of which stood that lonely hill on the slope of which Godfrey Enstone had lain down, as he thought, to die.

X'ow it was humming with life, and bustling with industry, honeycomoc! through and through with drives and shafts, and tunnels, out of which the rattling trucks were bringing the gold laden ore, half of which, amounting now to many millions of pounds in value, should have been the property of the man who, for all ho knew, had died where he had left him. "Enstone—Enstone," ho repeated to his friend, Colonel Forester, lately retired with (die V. C. You don't mean the Xorthumberland Enstones, do you, colonel ?" "Oh, yes; T don't know of any others; and. as a. matter of fact, the family is extinct. Why do you ask, if it isn't a rude question?" "Because," slowly said the millionaire, still keeping his eyes, already kindling with an unwonted lir.i, on the most beautiful face, even in that room where every woman was. or had been, a beauty in her time, "a good many years ago, before I struck : it rich, I was chums with a fellow of i that name away in the back sections of northeastern Australia. He died there, poor chap, just when we'd found tho Lone Kill." (To bo Continued.)