Five small wooden huts originally brought from England and later hauled forty miles or more across a camp on bullock-wagons to start a new colony next to Indian territory. Each hut is about eight feet square and they are a foot apart with the high grass cut off around about in case of prairie fires. Three men from one end hut have gone shooting deer or emus or whatever turns up, leaving a heap of powder-flasks, guns, saddles, and clothes in one corner of their shanty; blankets, etc., hanging out of the lower bunk, half-cover and open box on the floor with eight pounds of loose powder in it. The next hut is empty except when the owner comes to lie down, gasp, and perspire. It is so hot that you can break a piece of grass, and he is digging, with scarcely any clothes on, the first big corral ditch. Once as he lies half stupidly, listening lazily to a crackling, thinking that if he had sense enough he would wonder what it could be. Then he gets up to see. Fire had started in some way in the heap of clothes and was running up the thin boards to the roof. There is not much room but there is a fork with which he begins to shovel out the burning heap, and yell for water, which his brother, asleep in a further hut, brings when he realizes what is wanted. This water was thrown into the box of powder, but all this time the sparks have been falling into it and the man wants to know why everything was not blown to kingdom come before that water came.

When the shooters got home there were remarks. Reminded me of the story of two roughs in London who were talking over an article in a paper about the improvement of the lower classes which one read to the other, who remarked: "Yes, we're a bad lot, Bill, but we 'as our fun. The other day there was a bloody fire and the bloody fire engine come down the bloody street to the bloody 'ouse an' there was a bloody ole fool standin' at the top winder, an' I says, jump, ye bloody fool and me an' my mate Bill'll ketch yer in our blanket, an' the bloody fool 'e jumps an' e' breaks 'is bloody neck—we 'adn't got no bloody blanket."