Towards the end of the year Nosey arrived at Piney Station, about forty miles from the Murray, and obtained employment.  Baldy’s bones had been lying under the rocks for nearly fifteen years.  It was absurd to suppose they could ever be discovered now, or if they were, that any evidence could be got out of them.  Nosey felt sure that all danger for himself was passed, but still the murder was frequently in his mind.  The squatter was often lonely, and his new man was garrulous, and one day Nosey, while at work, began to relate many particulars of life in the old country, in Van Diemen’s Land, and in the other colonies, and he could not refrain from mentioning the greatest of his exploits.

“I once done a man in Victoria,” he said, “when I was shepherding; he found me out taking his fat sheep, and was going to inform on me, so I done him with an axe, and put him away so as nobody could ever find him.”

The squatter thought that Nosey’s story was mostly blowing, especially that part of it referring to the murder.  No man who had really done such a deed, would be so foolish as to confess it to a stranger.

Another man was engaged to work at the station.  As soon as he saw Nosey he exclaimed, “Hello, Nosey, is that you?”

“My name is not Nosey.”

“All right; a name is nothing.  We are old chums, anyway.”

That night the two men had a long talk about old times.  They had both served their time in the island, and were, moreover, “townies,” natives of the same town at home.  Nosey began the conversation by saying to his old friend, “I’ve been a bad boy since I saw you last —­I done a man in Victoria”; and then he gave the full particulars of his crime, as already related.  But the old chum could not believe the narrative, any more than did the squatter.

“Well, Nosey,” he said, “you can tell that tale to the marines.”

In the meantime the runs around Lake Nyalong had been surveyed by the government and sold.  In the Rises the land was being subdivided and fenced with stone walls, and there was a chance that Baldy’s grave might be discovered if one of the surveyed lines ran near it, for the stonewallers picked up the rocks as near as possible to the wall they were building, and usually to about the distance of one chain on each side of it.

A man who had a contract for the erection of one of these walls took with him his stepson to assist in the work.  In the month of August, 1869, they were on their way to their work accompanied by a dog which chased a rabbit into a pile of rocks.  The boy began to remove the rocks in order to find the rabbit, and in doing so uncovered part of a human skeleton.  He beckoned to his stepfather, who was rather deaf, to come and look at what he had found.  The man came, took up the skull, and examined it.

“I’ll be bound this skull once belonged to Baldy,” he said.  “There is a hole here behind; and, yes, one jaw has been broken.  That’s Nosey’s work for sure’ I wonder where he is now.”