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Frank returned to Nyalong, happier than either. He related the particulars of the trial to his friends with the utmost cheerfulness. Whether he recovered all the worldly goods with which he had endowed Cecily is doubtful, but he faithfully kept his promise that "There 'ull be no more Cecilies for me." There was a demon of mischief at work on Philip's hill at both sides of the dividing fence.
Nosey, the shepherd, was then living at Nyalong, having murdered the other shepherd, Baldy, about six months before, and this judge sent Nosey to the gallows seventeen years afterwards; but neither Nosey nor the judge knew what was to happen after seventeen years. This is the story of Nosey and Baldy.
The preliminary examination was held in the court house at Nyalong, and there was a large gathering of spectators when the proceedings commenced. On a form below the witness box there was something covered with a white sheet. Men craned their necks and looked at it over one another's shoulders. The two prisoners eyed it intently.
The settlers and other inhabitants ought to be well off; if not, it was their own fault, for they had the best land in the whole of Australia. Philip felt sure that he would find at least one friend at Nyalong viz., Mr. Barton, whom he had harboured in his tent at Bendigo, and had sheltered from the pursuit of the three bloodthirsty convicts.
The two shepherds were employed on a station north of Lake Nyalong. It is a country full of dead volcanoes, whose craters have been turned into salt lakes, and their rolling floods of lava have been stiffened into barriers of black rocks; where the ashes belched forth in fiery blasts from the deep furnaces of a burning world have covered the hills and plains with perennial fertility.
Enquiries were made at the township, and it was found that Baldy had been to Nyalong the previous day, and had left in the evening carrying two bottles of gin. This circumstance seemed to account for his absence; he had taken too much of the liquor, was lying asleep somewhere, and would reappear in the course of the day.
One by one as night approached the searchers returned to the hut. They had discovered nothing, and the only conclusion they could come to was, that Baldy was taking a very long sleep somewhere which was true enough. Next day every man from the neighbouring stations, and some from Nyalong, joined in the search.
He could box and wrestle so well that few white men could throw him. He could also drink rum; so whenever he got any white money he knew how to spend it. He was the best thief and the worst bully of all the blacks about Nyalong, because he had been so well educated. I knew him well, and attended his funeral, walking in the procession with the doctor and twenty blackfellows.
North, south, east, and west the land was held under squatting licenses; with the exception of the home paddocks it was unfenced, and the stock was looked after by boundary riders and shepherds. To the south, between Nyalong and the sea a distance of fifty or sixty miles the country was not occupied by either the white or the black men.
That is what I had to flog him for, and then he was sent back to Sydney. So you can just think what a man like that would do. When my time was up I went as a trooper to the Nyalong district under Captain Foster, the Commissioner, and after a while I settled down and married an immigrant woman from Tipperary, a Catholic.
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