"I will pay for it."

"No, Mr. Heathcote. I don't pretend to know this country yet, but
I'll encourage no such espionage as that. At any rate, it is not
English. I dare say the man misbehaved himself in your employment.
You say he was drunk. I do not doubt it. But he is not a drunkard,
for he never drinks here. A man is not to starve forever because he
once got drunk and was impertinent. Nor is he to have a spy at his
heels because a boy whom nobody knows chooses to denounce him. I am
sorry that you should be in trouble, but I do not know that I can
help you."

Harry's passion was now very high, and his resolution to be cool was
almost thrown to the winds. Medlicot had said many things which were
odious to him. In the first place, there had been a tone of
insufferable superiority, so Harry thought, and that, too, when he
himself had divested himself of all the superiority naturally
attached to his position, and had frankly appealed to Medlicot as a
neighbor. And then this new-fangled sugar grower had told him that he
was not English, and had said grand words, and had altogether made
himself objectionable. What did this man know of the Australian bush,
that he should dare to talk of this or that as being wrong because it
was un-English! In England there were police to guard men's property.
Here, out in the Australian forests, a man must guard his own, or
lose it. But perhaps it was the indifference to the ruin of the women
belonging to him that Harry Heathcote felt the strongest. The
stranger cared nothing for the utter desolation which one
unscrupulous ruffian might produce, felt no horror at the idea of a
vast devastating fire, but could be indignant in his mock