Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/516

 a quasi-criminal crowd for audience, the leading actor had more than once boasted of a score of murders and kindred outrages.

At the first outbreaks the highwaymen of the period had neither horses nor arms worthy of the name. Revolvers were unknown; pistols were far from being 'arms of precision.' Rifles even were rare; only the fowling-piece and the Tower musket were in common use. Horses, too, were scarce. So that the colonial summons of 'Bail up,' or even the old-fashioned British demand, 'Your money or your life,' came mostly from a ragged Robinson Crusoe-like individual behind a tree, with a rusty gun-barrel protruding therefrom.

Of course after the 'breaking out' of Port Phillip—as the earliest colonisation of Victoria was disrespectfully termed—in 1837, persons of darksome record hasted to the new settlement to hide from the law or prey on the public. Among them were three escaped Tasmanian felons, named Williams, Jepps, and Fogarty.

This worthy triumvirate raided the wilds of the Upper Plenty, robbing and holding to ransom the lieges, terrorising a line of farm-houses. They took prisoners my good friend Charles Ryan and the late Mr. Alick Hunter, adding insult to injury by eating the breakfast prepared for the latter gentleman and his friends. What the fashionables of the day wanted on the banks of the Plenty Rivulet I never could make out. But it was considered 'the thing' apparently to have a farm in that locality; it was even surmised that these aristocratic amateurs might make money by the practice of agriculture—a delusion long dispelled. What the solid fact amounted to re Jepps and Co. was that, like the footpads in Don Juan, their first accost was 'D— your eyes, your money or life.' So much for the 'first robbers' in Victoria.

To them enter four gentlemen—volunteers, squatters of the period and overlanders at that—Mr. Henry Fowler, of Fowler's Flat, near Albury; Mr. Peter Snodgrass, M.L.A., son of the Colonel and Lieutenant-Governor of that name, historically known as commanding the 13th Portuguese Regiment, when on August 31, 1813, he mounted the 'imminent deadly breach' at the siege of St. Sebastian;