A few days after this — on the 23rd of December — Maurice Frere was alarmed by a piece of startling intelligence. The notorious Dawes had escaped from gaol!

Captain Frere had inspected the prison that very afternoon, and it had seemed to him that the hammers had never fallen so briskly, nor the chains clanked so gaily, as on the occasion of his visit. “Thinking of their Christmas holiday, the dogs!” he had said to the patrolling warder. “Thinking about their Christmas pudding, the luxurious scoundrels!” and the convict nearest him had laughed appreciatively, as convicts and schoolboys do laugh at the jests of the man in authority. All seemed contentment. Moreover, he had — by way of a pleasant stroke of wit — tormented Rufus Dawes with his ill-fortune. “The schooner sails to-morrow, my man,” he had said; “you’ll spend your Christmas at the mines.” And congratulated himself upon the fact that Rufus Dawes merely touched his cap, and went on with his stone-cracking in silence. Certainly double irons and hard labour were fine things to break a man’s spirit. So that, when in the afternoon of that same day he heard the astounding news that Rufus Dawes had freed himself from his fetters, climbed the gaol wall in broad daylight, run the gauntlet of Macquarie Street, and was now supposed to be safely hidden in the mountains, he was dumbfounded.

“How the deuce did he do it, Jenkins?” he asked, as soon as he reached the yard.

“Well, I’m blessed if I rightly know, your honour,” says Jenkins. “He was over the wall before you could say ‘knife’. Scott fired and missed him, and then I heard the sentry’s musket, but he missed him, too.”

“Missed him!” cries Frere. “Pretty fellows you are, all of you! I suppose you couldn’t hit a haystack at twenty yards? Why, the man wasn’t three feet from the end of your carbine!”

The unlucky Scott, standing in melancholy attitude by the empty irons, muttered something about the sun having been in his eyes. “I don’t know how it was, sir. I ought to have hit him, for certain. I think I did touch him, too, as he went up the wall.”

A stranger to the customs of the place might have imagined that he was listening to a conversation about a pigeon match.

“Tell me all about it,” says Frere, with an angry curse. “I was just turning, your honour, when I hears Scott sing out ‘Hullo!’ and when I turned round, I saw Dawes’s irons on the ground, and him a-scrambling up the heap o’ stones yonder. The two men on my right jumped up, and I thought it was a made-up thing among ’em, so I covered ’em with my carbine, according to instructions, and called out that I’d shoot the first that stepped out. Then I heard Scott’s piece, and the men gave a shout like. When I looked round, he was gone.”

“Nobody else moved?”

“No, sir. I was confused at first, and thought they were all in it, but Parton and Haines they runs in and gets between me and the wall, and then Mr. Short he come, and we examined their irons.”

“All right?”

“All right, your honour; and they all swore they knowed nothing of it. I know Dawes’s irons was all right when he went to dinner.”

Frere stopped and examined the empty fetters. “All right be hanged,” he said. “If you don’t know your duty better than this, the sooner you go somewhere else the better, my man. Look here!”

The two ankle fetters were severed. One had been evidently filed through, and the other broken transversely. The latter was bent, as from a violent blow.

“Don’t know where he got the file from,” said Warder Short.

“Know! Of course you don’t know. You men never do know anything until the mischief’s done. You want me here for a month or so. I’d teach you your duty! Don’t know — with things like this lying about? I wonder the whole yard isn’t loose and dining with the Governor.”

“This” was a fragment of delft pottery which Frere’s quick eye had detected among the broken metal.

“I’d cut the biggest ir............