But I knew better.

From the sublime to the ridiculous we all know the step is but
short, especially in the human mind; and to my tender mood succeeds
the recollection of an absurd panic we once suffered from, about
swaggers. Exaggerated stories had reached us, brought by timid fat
men on horseback, with bulky pocket-books, who came to buy our
wethers for the Hokitika market, of "sticking up" having broken out
on the west land. I fear my expressions are often unintelligible to
an English reader, but in this instance I will explain. "Sticking
up" is merely a concise colonial rendering of "Your money or your
life," and was originally employed by Australian bushrangers, those
terrible freebooters whose ranks used to be always recruited from
escaped convicts. Fortunately we had no community of that class,
only a few prisoners kept in a little ricketty wooden house in
Christchurch, from which an enterprising baby might easily have
escaped. I dare say as we get more civilized out there, we shall
build ourselves handsome prisons and penitentiaries; but in those
early days a story was current of a certain jailor who let all his
captives out on some festal occasion, using the tremendous threat,
that whoever had not returned by eight o'clock should be "_locked
out!_"

But to return to that particular winter evening. We had been
telling each other stories which we had heard or read of bushranging
exploits, until we were all as nervous as possible. Ghosts, or even
burglar stories, are nothing to the horror of a true bushranger
story, and F--- had made himself particularly ghastly and
disagreeable by giving a minute account of an adventure which had
been told to him by one of the survivors.