held them. Harry had made himself altogether disagreeable to them.
They were squatters as well as he--or at least so they termed
themselves; and though they would not have expected to be admitted to
home intimacies, they thought that when they were met out-of-doors or
in public places, they should be treated with some respect. On such
occasions Harry treated them as though they were dirt beneath his
feet. The Brownbies would be found, whenever a little money came
among them, at the public billiard-rooms and race-courses within one
hundred and fifty miles of Boolabong. At such places Harry Heathcote
was never seen. It would have been as easy to seduce the Bishop of
Brisbane into a bet as Harry Heathcote. He had never even drank a
nobbler with one of the Brownbies. To their thinking, he was a proud,
stuck-up, unsocial young cub, whom to rob was a pleasure, and to ruin
would be a delight.

The old man at Boolabong was now almost obsolete. Property, that he
could keep in his grasp, there was in truth none. He was the tenant
of the run under the Crown, and his sons would not turn him out of
the house. The cattle, when there were cattle, belonged to them. They
were in no respect subject to his orders, and he would have had a bad
life among them were it not that they quarreled among themselves, and
that in such quarrels he could belong to one party or to the other.
The house itself was a wretched place--out of order, with doors and
windows and floors shattered, broken, and decayed. There were none of
womankind belonging to the family, and in such a house a decent
woman-servant would have been out of her place. Sometimes there was
one hag there and sometimes another, and sometimes feminine aid less
respectable than that of the hags. There had been six sons. One had
disappeared utterly, so that nothing was known of him. One had been
absolutely expelled by the brethren, and was now a vagabond in the