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The ground plan is extremely simple. It consists of two rooms, oblong, and generally of the same size one to live in, the other to sleep in for the great majority of the squatters' hovels have no upstair rooms. At one end there is a small shed for odds and ends. This shed used to be built with an oven, but now scarcely any labourers bake their own bread, but buy of the baker.
Till the arrival of the two Pattersons, the largest establishment of this sort was that of Mr. Jamieson, which covered an area of seventy-five miles, with a frontage of about eight miles along the Peron, one of the affluents of the Darling. Now Hottam Station bore the palm for business and extent. The young men were both squatters and settlers.
However, the aboriginals are pretty numerous throughout Kimberley, and are a constant source of vexation and annoyance to the squatters, whose cattle are frequently killed and driven wild by native depredators.
Hard by he had glimpsed the familiar broad back of McTurpin. At first the half-whispered converse of the trio at the adjoining table was incomprehensible to his ears, but after a time he caught words, phrases, sentences. First the word "squatters" reached him, several times repeated; then, "at Rincon." Finally, "the best lots in the city can be held."
The squatters were assisted in their endeavours to diminish the numbers of their live stock by their neighbours, both black and white. It is absurd to blame the aborigines for killing sheep and cattle. You might as well say it is immoral for a cat to catch mice.
The squatters, as they are called, are men who occupy with their cattle, or their habitations, those spots on the confines of a colony or estate, which have not as yet become any person's private property.
When service lacked, and there was no one to wash and iron her cambric and fine linen, she contrived somehow that the supply should not fail, and brought upon herself some ill-natured ridiculed in consequence. The wives of the Leura squatters thought her 'stuck-up' and apart from their kind.
Old Dint-the-Tin was a wealthy man, and had made his fortune out of the land by exercising a shrewdness that was the envy of half the squatters in the colony, and had no apparent desire in life but to go on increasing that fortune in the same way, although there were some who credited him with a great if secret satisfaction in seeing his wife outdo the wives of his neighbours in the social graces, a satisfaction superior to the gratification he derived from adding to his great accumulation in the Bank of New South Wales.
When nothing was to be expected from a poor selector or a station hand, and the doctor was hard up, he went to the squatter for a few pounds. He had on occasions been offered cheques of 50 Pounds and 100 Pounds by squatters for 'pulling round' their wives or children; but such offers always angered him. When he asked for 5 Pounds he resented being offered a 10 Pound cheque.
"If you fire another shot at him I'll put up every dollar I own to hang every man that ever rode a foot with Lang! Do you hear that, Lang?" "Lang's in Idaho," a voice growled surlily from the shop. "None of us ever rode with Lang. We're from every brand on the range and we're going to burn you squatters out." "Draw off and let us ride away," she said. "You can have the Three Bar."
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