s to the
public for purchase on easy terms and conditions. The idea was to settle
an industrious peasantry on lands hitherto leased in large blocks to the
squatters. This brought down a flood of settlement on Kuryong. At the
top end of the station there was a chain of mountains, and the country
was rugged and patchy--rich valleys alternating with ragged hills. Here
and there about the run were little patches of specially good land,
which were soon snapped up. The pioneers of these small settlers were
old Morgan Donohoe and his wife, who had built the hotel at Kiley's
Crossing; and, on their reports, all their friends and relatives, as
they came out of the "ould country," worked their way to Kuryong, and
built little bits of slab and bark homesteads in among the mountains.
The rougher the country, the better they liked it. They were a
horse-thieving, sheep-stealing breed, and the talents which had made
them poachers in the old country soon made them champion bushmen in
their new surroundings. The leader of these mountain settlers was one
Doyle, a gigantic Irishman, who had got a grant of a few hundred acres
in the mountains, and had taken to himself a Scotch wife from among the
free immigrants. The story ran that he was too busy to go to town, but
asked a friend to go and pick a wife for him, "a fine shtrappin' woman,
wid a good brisket on her."

The Doyles were large, slow, heavy men, with an instinct for the
management of cattle; they were easily distinguished from the Donohoes,
who were little red-whiskered men, enterprising and quick-witted, and
ready to do anything in the world for a good horse. Other strangers
and outlanders came to settle in the district, but from the original
settlement up to the date of our story the two great families of the
Doyles and the Donohoes governed the neighbourhood, and the headquarters
of the clans was at Donohoe's "Shamrock Hotel," at Kiley's Crossing.
Here they used to rendezvous when they went away down to the plains
country each year for the shearing; for they added to their resources by
travelling about the country shearing, droving, fencing, tanksinking,
or doing any other job that offered itself, but always returned to their
mountain fastnesses ready for any bit of work "on the cross" (i.e.,
unlawful) that might turn up. When times got hard they had a handy knack
of finding horses that nobody had lost, shearing sheep they did not own,
and branding and selling other people's ca