left the solitude
untouched, but robbed the picture of all else. Once, tradition averred,
a hardy, daring denizen of Birralong had ventured out to the Three-mile
for a yarn and a smoke with Slaughter. It was in the days when he had
lately taken up the land, and when the glamours of proprietorship should
have been still thick upon him, and when the neighbourly act of a
brother settler ought to have been greeted with a friendly warmth. But
the adventurer rode back to Birralong distressed and distrait, refusing,
or failing, to put into words for the benefit of others his experience
at the lonely Three-mile. All that he could express was conveyed by the
pursing up of his lips, the nodding of his head in the direction of
Slaughter's residence, and the exclaiming, solemnly and sadly, "Him? A
melancholy bandicoot ain't in it." That, and the influence of
Slaughter's bearing and conversation, when he was in the township, had
upon the community effectually prevented any one else making the attempt
to penetrate into the solitude of the Three-mile; and Slaughter lived
his own life, in his own way, and no one knew more of it than had been
learned in the first year of his residence in the district.

He was a customer of Marmot's, and that gave him the right to sit and
smoke and yarn on the verandah of the store when he was in the township.
He never passed his tobacco round, and rarely took an active part in the
yarning, save to put in a few curt, cutting sentences that at first
roused a sense of anger in his hearers, till they fell back under the
protection of the phrase that "it was only Cold-blood Slaughter," and
ignored the words that grated. He ran a "tally" at the store for the few
necessaries of his life, and every six months cleared it with money
which came in a letter for him from a city in a southern colony. It was
the one link which existed between Slaughter and the outside world, that
half-yearly letter, and its contents the one unsolved riddle in the
annals of Birralong. With the regularity of the date itself the letter
appeared, bearing the Sydney postmark on the cover, and as regularly
Slaughter allowed it to rest a few days at the store, as though he knew
both the mental anxiety it caused the _habitues_ of the verandah as they
tried to worry out some feasible explanation of its appearance, and the
moral struggle its presence caused Marmot, who, as postmaster, felt
bound by every tie of duty to hold it inviolate for the