The True Story of the KellyGang of Bushrangers Chapter 20 page 3

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During this time the outlaws were only occasionally returning the police fire, and the prisoners in the dark house with them knew little of what they were doing. They were clad in their armour, during at least a part of that time, and now and then the prisoners heard the sound of bullets ringing upon it. While this armour, made by some local blacksmith, with huge headpieces quilted inside, probably by the Kelly’s sisters, gave the outlaws comparative safety on the head, chest, back, and sides which it covered, it nevertheless largely helped to their destruction. Each suit, made of ¼-in. iron plates, weighed nearly 100 pounds. Unhampered by armour, the Kellys might at the last minute have made a bolt for liberty, and at any rate would have shot down some of their assailants; but encased in iron they could scarcely move and could not hold their rifles to their shoulders to take aim.

It is hard to know what their plans were. Their horses were tethered to trees near the hotel, and probably they meant to mount and ride away, but early in the fight these horses were discovered by the police and shot to prevent the outlaws’ escape. They, however, could scarcely have known this, and the three other members of the gang were probably waiting anxiously and without a leader for the return of Ned, who disappeared from the house into the darkness after the first volleys had been fired. What he went for, no one knows. Escape, at least alone, cannot have been his object, for at eight o’clock he was seen among the trees, a tall, grotesque figure, stalking towards the hotel and firing with his revolver on the police. His blood stained rifle had been found in the grass not long before. A wound in the hand made it useless to him, and now with a revolver only he faced the nine police who fired on him as he tried to regain the hotel. Under a long grey overcoat he wore his armour, and though he staggered beneath the blows from rifle bullets which struck him again and again, he tapped his armour clad breast and laughed derisively. Then they fired at his legs. He wore no armour there, and presently he fell. The police, headed by Sergeant Steele, rushed in and secured him, wrenching away his revolver. With many wounds in his arms and legs he lay helplessly cursing upon the ground. His career as an outlaw over for ever, he was presently stripped of his armour and carried to the railway station where a doctor attended to his wounds.

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