The rabbit, destined to bring Nosey to the gallows, was a favoured animal on Austin’s station at the Barwon.  It was a privilege to shoot him—­in small quantities—­he was so precious.  But he soon became, as the grammar says, a noun of multitude.  He swarmed on the plains, hopped over the hills, burrowed among the rocks in the Rises, and nursed his multitudinous progeny in every hollow log of the forest.  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.  All these men get colonial experience, but it does not make them saintly or rich.  Here and there, all over the endless plains, they at last lie down and die, the dingoes hold inquests over them, and, literally, they go to the dogs, because they took the wrong turn in life and would not come back.

In 1868 Nosey and his two mates were approaching a station on the Lachlan.  Since sunrise they had travelled ten miles without breakfast, and were both hungry and weary.  They put down their swags in the shade of a small grove of timber within sight of the station buildings.  Bob Castles said: