Neither mountain, lake, or river ever barred his passage.
He ate up all the grass and starved the pedigree cattle, the
well-born dukes and duchesses, and on tens of thousands of fertile
acres left no food to keep the nibbling sheep alive. Every hole and
crevice of the rocks was full of him. An uninvited guest, he dropped
down the funnel-shaped entrance to the den of the wombat, and made
himself at home with the wild cat and snake. He clothed the hills
with a creeping robe of fur, and turned the Garden of the West into a
wilderness. Science may find a theory to account for the beginning
of all things, but among all her triumphs she has been unable to put
an end to the rabbit. War has been made upon them by fire, dynamite,
phosphorus, and all deadly poisons; by dogs, cats, weasels, foxes,
and ferrets, but he still marches over the land triumphantly.
For fifteen years Nosey roamed from station to station under various
names, between Queensland and the Murray, but wherever he went, the
memory of his crime never left him. He had been taught in his
boyhood that murder was one of the four sins crying to heaven for
vengeance, and he knew that sooner or later the cry would be heard.
Sometimes he longed to unburden his mind to a priest, but he seldom
saw or heard of one. The men with whom he worked and wandered were
all like himself--lost souls who had taken the wrong turn in the
beginning of their days, the failures of all trades and professions;
thieves, drunkards, and gamblers; criminals who had fled from
justice; men of pleasure and, therefore, of misery; youths of good
family exported from England, Ireland, and Scotland to mend their
morals, to study wool, and become rich squatters.
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