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it’s all the same to her, so they do the deed in Benalla according to the rites of the Primitive Methodists. Well, who’s ever heard of them?
    Of course he doesn’t last the distance. Soon rides smiling down one Sunday morning to the hawker’s wagon for a new axe-head and forgets to bring it home, or himself with it. Children numbers nine and ten are his. George M. King was his full name, not the best advertisement for California, Protestants or the baking trade.

H e hasn’t been as bone-and-muscle tired as this since she married King. For a month after the wedding he’d just kept drinking rum, more or less forgotten to eat, then woke one morning with a violent craving for the Diggers’ Special at the Bellevue Tearooms in Beechworth. The Pork De Luxe With Eggs. This feast was a legend in the district. Streaky bacon, fried pork steaks, smoked shoulder ham, a slab of brawn, a bottom stratum of boiled trotters, all neatly layered in a mound, grouted with navy beans and crested with four fried eggs so that the pierced yolks flowed down the hill.
    He ate the lot before the eggs had dried into a trickle, stirred three sugars into his milky tea, barely made the street outside. Great rattling, gripping gurgles shook his bowels. Only nineteen and shitting sheets of water like an old cow in a lupin field.
    In that month, spaces where his memory used to be were filled with sentimental confidences and pointless arguments, surprised strangers’ busted noses. Sometimes after blurry midnight flurries with seasoned barmaids by the Broken River, he woke alone with blistered eyelids to frightening crow calls in the high sun-glare and thought himself pecked blind and hollow.
    That month he had to keep one eye closed to focus on what and whom he was doing. One eye closed against the savage sunshine, the scathing peacock, on the rare times he rode home.
    Something had to happen, better or much worse. Maybe a tiger snake bite while sleeping out. A final drunken roll down the riverbank. Who’d have thought him lucky to be arrested for riding (while passed out) across a footpath? There were burrs in his hair, grass and piss stains on his pants when they took him in a cart, unconscious, over the Broken River to the Benalla police station. Here a Sergeant Whelan, who remembered him from other matters, was in charge. Whelan took three troopers, Constables Lonigan, Fitzpatrick and O’Dea, along next morning to escort him – now on his feet, just – across the road to court.
    As if four men weren’t safeguard enough for one hungover youth, Fitzpatrick decided to handcuff him too. At this the prisoner stirred, swore loudly and lashed out. Fitzpatrick grabbed him by the throat and Lonigan the scrotum. Lonigan held on and on, and in this way they dragged him across the street and into the court.
    By this time he was sharp with pain and fury, snapped out of crapulence. His drink was hocussed, he insisted to the magistrates, to get him back in gaol. He was loud, alert, persuasive, and, surprisingly, let off with a fine.
    But he wasn’t finished. On the courthouse steps he yelled a threat. Said he’d never shot a man yet but if he did, so help him God, Lonigan would be the first.

D id you hear that down the back? The lady said what a pity,
ahem
, such a strapping young fellow should have become an outlaw and did I ever consider going straight?
    Madam, I must say it’s not as cut and dried as that. Things flow over into other things. You don’t wake up one morning saying, I’ve seen the light, today I’ll toe the line, be the coppers’ boy. But you could say that in the mid-seventies I had two years of intense law abiding.
    I worked as a timber feller for Saunders and Rule, cutting sleepers for the Wangaratta–Beechworth railway, then for another sawmiller, Heach and Dockendorf, in the Mansfield district, then back to S. and R. as sawmill overseer at Bourke’s Waterhole. When the sleeper contract ran out I went prospecting up the