length. Before I could reply, he resumed absently, "When I was a boy, away on the Queensland border, I knew a squatter—as fine a fellow as ever lived—and this man married some young lady in Sydney, and brought her to live on the station. A few months afterward, he came home unexpectedly at about two o'clock one morning, and found his place occupied by an intimate friend of his own—a young barrister, who was staying at the station as a guest. He managed to conceal his discovery; and, within the next few days, he got his friend to draw out a new will, by which he left everything, without reservation, to his wife. A day or two after completing the will, he took his gun and went out alone, turkey-shooting. He did n't come home that night; and next day one of the station hands found him at a wire fence, shot straight through the heart. Accidentally, of course. But we knew better."
"It might have been accidental, Alf," I suggested. "There's a lot of supposition in the story."
"None, Collins. Before going out with his gun, he wrote a letter to my father, and sent it by a trustworthy blackfellow. My father got the letter about ten o'clock at night; and he had a horse run-in at once, and started off for the station through a raging thunderstorm, arriving next day only in time to see his friend's body before it was moved to the house. My father was terribly cut-up about it. He was manager of an adjoining station at the time.
"Now let me tell you another true story," pursued Alf dreamily. "Five years ago, I knew a man on the Maroo, a tank-sinker, with a wife and two children. The wife got soft on a young fellow at the camp; and everybody, except the husband, saw how things stood. Presently the husband began to circulate the report that he was going to New Zealand. In the meantime, he sent the two children to a boarding-school in Wagga. He was in no hurry. Afterward, he sold his plant to the station, and bade good-bye, in the most friendly way, to all hands, including the Don Juan. Then he started across the country to Wagga, alone with his wife, in a wagonette. Are you listening?"
"Attentively, Alf. But suppose I boil your billy, and"
"Two years afterward, a flock was sold off the station I was speaking of, for Western Queensland; and one of the station men went with the drover's party, to see the sheep delivered. Curious coincidence: he met on the new station his old acquaintance, the tank-sinker, with his two children and a second wife. The tank-sinker told him that his first wife had died soon after leaving the Maroo, and that he had changed his mind about going to New Zealand. Am I making myself clear?"
"Yes; so far. You know the man you're speaking of?"
"Slightly. I delivered goods to him once on the Maroo, and casually heard the scandal that was in the air. Well, the shearing came round on the Maroo just as the station man got back from Queensland; and while the adjoining station was mustering for the shed, a boundary man found, in the centre of one of the paddocks—in the loneliest, barrenest hole of a place in New South Wales—he found where a big fire had been made, and some bones burnt into white cinders and smashed small with a stick. He
