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In New South Wales the number of officers in the cat-o'-nine tails department was about thirty. The danger attached to the office consisted in the certainty of the scourger being murdered by the scourgee, if ever the opportunity was given. Joe Kermode had once been a hutkeeper on a station.
The friends occasionally visited each other, but in those days the settlers were few and months often passed without the cattle rancher seeing his friend or anybody to speak to beside the one man he retained on the station as hutkeeper, stockman, and general factotum.
Butler was a literary man, and his snug sitting-room was fitted with books and easy chairs a piano also, upon which he was no mean performer. The station hands comprised a shepherd, bullock driver, hutkeeper, and two station hands employed in fencing in paddocks, which with Cook, the overseer, Butler, and myself made up the total.
The hut stood at the top of a lone gully, stretching away in a vista, nearly bare of trees for a width of about ten yards or so, all the way down, which gave it the appearance of a grass-ride, walled on each side by tall dark forest; looking down this, our hutkeeper saw, about a quarter of a mile off, a horseman cross from one side to the other.
The idea that occupied their minds at this point was that Jones was insane, probably led thereto by his lonely life; that he was wandering about in the bush in the neighbourhood of the hut, which he continued to visit, as they had seen, and that he had, with a madman's acuteness, purposely misled the hutkeeper about his going to England.
Some of them now dived into the pond, where they discovered the body of Jones, or what remained of it. The hutkeeper was immediately arrested, but denied any knowledge of the matter.
Smith and his companion feared to mention their suspicions to the hutkeeper, believing that he would not remain alone on the station if he thought that a maniac was about.
No; Elsy is good enough for me, and I'm not very badly off, and begin to fancy I would like some better sort of welcome in the evening than what a cranky old brute of a hutkeeper can give me. So I think I shall bring her home." "I wish you well, Matt," said Sam; "I hope you are not going to leave us though." "No fear, sir; Major Buckley is too good a master for that!"
They took a circuitous route, arriving as before at the stockyard without giving information to the hutkeeper, but at the same time directing two men to approach the hut unseen and watch it till further directions. When the party on this occasion approached the stockyard Jones was not occupying his usual seat on the rails.
Seeing Jones a second time, apparently in his usual health, had divested their minds of any suspicion that the hutkeeper had deceived them, or was in any way responsible, and the real facts as they subsequently turned out had not presented themselves to their minds. They decided now to place the matter in the hands of the police.
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