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When he thought it was safe he moved cautiously and slipped his hand under Brummy's head, but Brummy's old pocket-book in which he carried some dirty old letters in a woman's handwriting was not there. All next day Swampy watched Brummy sharply every time he put his hands into his pockets, to try and find out in which pocket he kept his money.
They usually slept on the ground, with a few leaves under them, or on the sand where there was any, each wrapped in his own blankets, and with their spare clothes, or rags rather, for pillows. Presently Swampy turned in and pretended to sleep, but he lay awake watching, and listening to Brummy's breathing.
Swampy crept back to him and felt the lining of his hat, and was running his hand over Brummy's chest when Brummy suddenly started to snore, and Swampy desisted without loss of time. He crept back to bed, breathing short, and thought hard. It struck him that there was something aggressive about that snore. He began to suspect that Brummy was up to his little game, and it pained him.
So he brought the sheep home early and made arrangements for the burial by measuring the outer casing of Brummy and digging a hole according to those dimensions. "That 'minds me," he said. "I never rightly knowed Brummy's religion, blest if ever I did.
Both were short and stout, and both had scrubby beards, but Brummy's beard was a dusty black and Swampy's fiery red he indulged in a monkey-shave sometimes, but his lower face was mostly like a patch of coarse stubble with a dying hedge round it. They had travelled together for a long time. They seemed at times to hate each other with a murderous hatred, but they were too lazy to fight.
This girl remembered how she used to watch this tattooed woman going up and down on Brummy's arm when he was working in the saw-pit going up and down and up and down, like this, while Brummy was working his end of the saw. So the bushranger was inquested and justifiable-homicided as Brummy Usen, and buried again in his dust and blood stains and monkey-jacket.
She would argue about it till the day she died, and then she said with her dying breath: 'It wasn't Brummy Usen. No more it was he was a different kind of man; he hadn't spunk enough to be a bushranger, and it was a better man that was buried for him; it was a different kind of woman, holding up a different kind of branch, that was tattooed on Brummy's arm.
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