After walking through the woods a considerable distance in perfect silence—for the suddenness of the disaster seemed to have bereft the two friends of speech—Tom Brixton turned abruptly and said—

“Well, Fred, we’re in a nice fix now. What is to be our next move in this interesting little game?”

Fred Westly shook his head with an air of profound perplexity, but said nothing.

“I’ve a good mind,” continued Tom, “to return to Pine Tree Diggings, give myself up, and get hanged right off. It would be a good riddance to the world at large, and would relieve me of a vast deal of trouble.”

“There is a touch of selfishness in that speech, Tom—don’t you think?—for it would not relieve me of trouble; to say nothing of your poor mother!”

“You’re right, Fred. D’you know, it strikes me that I’m a far more selfish and despicable brute than I used to think myself.”

He looked at his companion with a sad sort of smile; nevertheless, there was a certain indefinable ring of sincerity in his tone.

“Tom,” said the other, earnestly, “will you wait for me here for a few minutes while I turn aside to pray?”

“Certainly, old boy,” answered Tom, seating himself on a mossy bank. “You know I cannot join you.”

“I know you can’t, Tom. It would be mockery to pray to One in whom you don’t believe; but as I believe in God, the Bible, and prayer, you’ll excuse my detaining you, just for—”

“Say no more, Fred. Go; I shall wait here for you.”

A slight shiver ran through Brixton’s frame as he sat down, rested his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands.

“God help me!” he exclaimed, under a sudden impulse, “I’ve come down very low, God help me!”

Fred soon returned.

“You prayed for guidance, I suppose?” said Tom, as his friend sat down beside him.

“I did.”

“Well, what is the result?”

“There is no result as yet—except, of course, the calmer state of my mind, now that I have committed our case into our Father’s hands.”

“Your Father’s, you mean.”

“No, I mean our, for He is your father as well as mine, whether you admit it or not. Jesus has bought you and paid for you, Tom, with His own blood. You are not your own.”

“Not my own? bought and paid for!” thought Brixton, recalling the scene in which words of somewhat similar import had been addressed to him. “Bought and paid for—twice bought! Body and soul!” Then, aloud, “And what are you going to do now, Fred?”

“Going to discuss the situation with you.”

“And after you have discussed it, and acted according to our united wisdom, you will say that you have been guided.”

“Just so! That is exactly what I will say and believe, for ‘He is faithful who has promised.’”

“And if you make mistakes and go wrong, you will still hold, I suppose, that you have been guided?”

“Undoubtedly I will—not guided, indeed, into the mistakes, but guided to what will be best in the long-run, in spite of them.”

“But Fred, how can you call guidance in the wrong direction right guidance?”

“Why, Tom, can you not conceive of a man being guided wrongly as regards some particular end he has in view, and yet that same guidance being right, because leading him to something far better which, perhaps, he has not in view?”

“So that” said Tom, with a sceptical laugh, “whether you go right or go wrong, you are sure to come right in the end!”

“Just so! ‘All things work together for good to them that love God.’”

“Does not that savour of Jesuitism, Fred, which teaches the detestable doctrine that you may do evil if good is to come of it?”

“Not so, Tom; because I did not understand you to use the word wrong in the sense of sinful, but in the sense of erroneous—mistaken. If I go in a wrong road, knowing it to be wrong, I sin; but if I go in a wrong road mistakenly, I still count on guidance, though not perhaps to the particular end at which I aimed—nevertheless, guidance to a good end. Surely you will admit that no man is perfect?”

“Admitted.”

“Well, then, imperfection implies mistaken views and ill-directed action, more or less, in every one, so that if we cannot claim to be guided by God except when free from error in thought and act, then there is no such thing as Divine guidance at all. Surely you don’t hold that!”

“Some have held it.”

“Yes; ‘the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,’—some have even gone the length of letting it out of the heart and past the lips. With such we cannot argue; their case admits only of pity and prayer.”

“I agree with you there, Fred; but if your views are not Jesuitical, they seem to me to be strongly fatalistic. Commit one’s way to God, you say; then, shut one’s eyes, drive ahead anyhow, and—the end will be sure to be all right!”

“No, I did not say that. With the exception of the first sentence, Tom, that is your way of stating the case, not God’s way. If you ask in any given difficulty, ‘What shall I do?’ His word replies, ‘Commit thy way unto the Lord. Trust also in Him, and He will bring it to pass.’ If you ask, ‘How am I to know what is best?’ the Word again replies, ‘hear, ye deaf; look, ye blind, that you may see.’ Surely that is the reverse of shutting the eyes, isn’t it? If you say, ‘how shall I act?’ the Word answers, ‘A good man will guide his affairs with discretion.’ That’s not driving ahead anyhow, is it?”

“You may be right,” returned Tom, “I hope you are. But, come, what does your wisdom suggest in the present difficulty?”

“The first thing that occurs to me,” replied the other, “is what Flinders said, just before we were ordered off by the robbers. ‘Keep round by Bevan’s Gully,’ he said, in the midst of his serio-comic leave-taking; and again he said, ‘Bevan’s Gully—sharp!’ Of course Paddy, with his jokes and stammering, has been acting a part all through this business, and I am convinced that he has heard something about Bevan’s Gully; perhaps an attack on Bevan himself, which made him wish to tell us to go there.”

“Of course; how stupid of me not to see that before! Let’s go at once!” cried Tom, starting up in excitement. “Undoubtedly he meant that. He must have overheard the villains talk of going there, and we may not be in time to aid them unless we push on.”

“But in what direction does the gully lie?” asked Fred, with a puzzled look.

Tom returned the look with one of perplexity, for they were now a considerable distance both from Bevan’s Gully and Pine Tree Diggings, in the midst of an almost unknown wilderness. From the latter place either of the friends could have travelled to the former almost blindfold; but, having by that time lost their exact bearings, they could only guess at the direction.

“I think,” said Fred, after looking round and up at the sky for some time, “considering the time we have been travelling, and the position of the sun, that the gully lies over yonder. Indeed, I feel almost sure it does.”

He pointed, as he spoke, towards a ridge of rocky ground that cut across the western sky and hid much of the more distant landscape in that direction.

“Nonsense, man!” returned Tom, sharply, “it lies in precisely the opposite direction. Our adventures have turned your brain, I think. Come, don’t let us lose time. Think of Betty; that poor girl may be killed if there is another attack. She was slightly wounded last time. Come!”

Fred looked quickly in his friend’s face. It was deeply flushed, and his eye sparkled with unwonted fire.

“Poor fellow! his case is hopeless; she will never wed him,” thought Fred, but he only said, “I, too, would not waste time, but it seems to me we shall lose much if we go in that direction. The longer I study the nature of the ground, and calculate our rate of travelling since we left the diggings, the more am I convinced that our way lies westward.”

“I feel as certain as you do,” replied Tom with some asperity, for he began to chafe under the delay. “But if you are determined to go that way you must go by yourself, old boy, for I can’t afford to waste time on a wrong road.”

“Nay, if you are so sure, I will give in and follow. Lead on,” returned Tom’s accommodating friend, with a feeling of mingled surprise and chagrin.

In less than an hour they reached a part of the rocky ridge before mentioned, from which they had a magnificent view of the surrounding country. It was wilderness truly, but such a wilderness of tree and bush, river and lake, cascade and pool, flowering plant and festooned shrub, dense thicket and rolling prairie, backed here and there by cloud-capped hills, as seldom meets the eye or thrills the heart of traveller, except in alpine lands. Deep pervading silence marked the hour, for the air was perfectly still, and though the bear, the deer, the wolf, the fox, and a multitude of wild creatures were revelling there in the rich enjoyment of natural life, the vast region, as it were, absorbed and dissipated their voices almost as completely as their persons, so that it seemed but a grand untenanted solitude, just freshly laid out by the hand of the wonder-working Creator. Every sheet of water, from the pool to the lake, reflected an almost cloudless blue, excepting towards the west, where the sun, by that time beginning to descend, converted all into sheets of liquid gold.

The two friends paused on the top of a knoll, more to recover breath than to gaze on the exquisite scene, for they both felt that they were speeding on a mission that might involve life or death. Fred’s enthusiastic admiration, however, would no doubt have found vent in fitting words if he h............