things are good for."

But the riders still rode and the footmen ran. There was a clatter of
hoofs on the short white bridge looming ghostly ahead, and then, at a
weird interval, the rattle and rumble of wheels, with no hoof-beats
accompanying. The yells grew fainter. Harry's leader was a good
horse, of the rather heavy coachhorse breed, with a little of the
racing blood in her, but she was tired to start with, and only
excitement and fright at the feel of the "pull" of the twisting wire
kept her up to that speed; and now she was getting winded, so half a
mile or so beyond the bridge Harry thought it had gone far enough, and
he stopped and got down. The van ran on a bit, of course, and the
loop of the wire slipped off the hooks of the pole. The wire recoiled
itself roughly along the dust nearly to the heels of Harry's horse.
Harry grabbed up as much of the wire as he could claw for, took the
mare by the neck with the other hand, and vanished through the dense
fringe of scrub off the road, till the wire caught and pulled him up;
he stood still for a moment, in the black shadow on the edge of a
little clearing, to listen. Then he fumbled with the wire until he
got it untwisted, cast it off, and moved off silently with the mare
across the soft rotten ground, and left her in a handy bush stockyard,
to be brought back to the stables at a late hour that night--or rather
an early hour next morning--by a jackaroo stable-boy who would have
two half-crowns in his pocket and afterthought instructions to look
out for that wire and hide it if possible.

Then Harry Chatswood got back quickly, by a roundabout way, and walked
into the bar of the Royal, through the back entrance from the stables,
and stared, and wanted to know where all the chaps had gone to, and
what the noise was about, and whose trap had run away, and if anybody