All the next morning Jabez Gegg moped about desperate in his want of security, despairing for the loss of freedom, and with an ever- recurring dread of disaster before him. To go out anywhere now in the open day was fraught with danger; but to bivouac among the weeping willows of Bilbo Creek, almost under the very eaves of Tipparoo homestead, was walking into the lion's mouth. It seemed to him that he had been given the task of a Hercules, that some of that vindictive, vituperative feeling that actuated Pellas when he sent his cousin, Jason, on the argonautic expedition to Colchis to recover the Golden Fleece from the King of Aetes, possessed Magnus Susman when he charged him with an undertaking so prodigious and perilous.
Jabez Gegg was a rank coward, a low miscreant, who had not the nerve or courage to meet the eye of an intended victim. All the morning he shook in his boots with fear; and as the sun crossed the meridian and the afternoon began to wane, his breath came in short gasps, and his agitation increased to such an extent that the combination gave a tremulous accent to his speech. In vain he took up a book and tried to read; the face of Richard Merton seemed to look up from its pages, and constables and black-trackers to run along the lines; and all the while there rang in his ears the last dread sentence of the law: "That you shall hang by the neck until you are dead!" Then the fatal hour came, and, disguised as a tramp, a swag slung over his shoulder, and a billy in his hand, he was conducted out of the garden by Magnus Susman and sent on his errand.
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