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Thus urged, they informed us of the slaughter of another cow, killed the previous day (a thing we were as yet ignorant of). This was a great crime to any settler, and Stevenson threatened them severely if they kept anything back which they knew about destruction of sheep or cattle on the run; and they then confessed to several misdemeanours of that kind, though on a small scale, during the time he had been on the station.

In his anxiety to save himself, and tell 'eberyting what all about black fellow do,' Pothook confessed every piece of petty roguery his tribe had been guilty of for a long time past. It was now that we learned that, on two occasions when the slip panel of the paddock had been left down, and the horses all escaped into the bush—by the carelessness of some passing traveller, as we supposed—it was one of the blacks who had played the trick, and who had been rewarded with two sticks of tobacco for speedily finding and bringing them back. Percussion caps had been stolen, tobacco lying about the hut purloined, and even charges of powder taken from the flasks when our backs were turned. But, above all, it was a black fellow's dog which had killed the cat, which, on account of the snakes infesting the neighbourhood of the huts, the superintendent had taken such trouble and pains to procure, riding forty miles with it in a basket strapped behind him, and the unaccountable loss of which had much surprised and vexed him, for it had disappeared the day after its arrival.