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Batman. He was pursued by several parties but it was him, Black Bill there, caught the monster.
    Him?
    The selfsame.
    The Vandemonian leaned forward and flung the dregs from his mug over the fire. His wet clothes clung to him. I was a party to the taking of Jeffries, he said. But merely a party.
    The Man Eater told me it was you took him, said Batman. I was there too dont forget.
    Under the gaze of the eight men Bill filled his mug from the billycan. Rain fell from the limbs above, fell and vanished in the fire’s gut. They watched him crush a gum leaf into his tea and then stir it with a long black finger. A good many things come out of his mouth, he said. But for the most part they were lies or worse. I will tell you this much though. Then Bill began upon a history he’d recounted a thousand times in grog shops and stock huts and walking the trails of the back country.
    I saw her with my own honest eyes, he said above the popping of the fire. A woman hardly older than you, boy. Blackened about her eyes, missing her front teeth, bleeding and staggering and near enough to naked she was. Crying as if she never meant to stop. Something truly awful had visited her for whichshe had no words to tell. I never saw its like. I was raised in the house of James Cox, Esquire, raised as good as blood, raised alongside his own children. I saw a good many things in my life there but now I was seeing something wholly new. When this woman arrived at the house she was tended by Mr. Cox’s maid and given rum and water for the pain and put to bed. Come the following day she’d regained herself somewhat but more was the pity for her.
    I believed her deranged and I dont doubt even now that she was. I told Mr. Cox and he was inclined to agree but nonetheless we went to her room and tried to get some sense from her. In the darkened room where she tolerated no light and where she was hidden among the bedclothes with her face covered over she commenced to tell us her story. And Mr. Cox and I, we listened and scarcely believed what we heard.
    Bill paused in his storytelling and drank from his mug of tea. The rain was easing and the thudding on his hat had slowed. He raked his eyes across them.
    Two men—Jeffries and a companion—had fallen upon this woman’s hut and upon her family, he said, but to hear her describe them we thought they were devils set forth from the core of the earth all ablaze and bent on blood spill. Most of what come out was barely more than nonsense but what I heard, what I understood at least, stopped the marrow in my bones.
    Seems these men entered her hut in the evening. They hadhold of a servant belonged of her neighbour and held a pistol to his head. They entered the hut where were sitting the woman and her husband and her infant and they screamed like animals and bade the householders to stay down. They knelt that old servant man among the child’s toys and proceeded to release the hammer. I saw his body when it was buried. The whole front of his head shot clean away. The woman’s clothes were rank with gore even a week later. Then a second pistol was produced and the husband was shot.
    The lags were unmoved by the tale. They pulled their blankets around and wiped their faces as the rain ran off their hair.
    Bill nodded, continued. Aye. If that was the worst, surely you’d sleep the night and wake come sunrise and never think again upon the Man Eater. But I have not finished. Not yet at least. So he marched that woman from her hut at pistolpoint while his partner sacked the place for food. The infant wailing in her arms. And he snatched the child’s leg and tore the child away and to hear this woman tell it he tore the very blood from her beating heart. He tore that child away and set to dashing it against a gum tree and all that sad scrub was filled with the sound.
    The company was silent as the Vandemonian swirled his tea and stared into the dark fluid as if he might there find an answer or at least find a