AustLit

A young constable in a Victorian country station (reader of 'The Detective's Album' in The Australian Journal) follows the local blacksmith's disappearance and discovers his murdered body in a charcoal heap at the hut of local illicit distillers. With the help of his sweetheart's younger brother and a fellow trooper he captures the guilty brothers who tied up their mother and left her with the constable whom they had earlier captured. Postscript conclusion describes the mother's frenzied axe murder of the blacksmith - more guilty than her sons ... (PB)