Phantom Avengers

Looking back on my long life of daredevil adventure in the Australian backwoods, I often wonder whether there is really some "Spirit of Justice" - some avenging angel - which acts as the Nemesis of wrongdoers in those wild parts of the Earth where prosaic police protection is as yet unknown. At any rate, I want to tell you in these few pages of a few, remarkable, not to say extraordinary grounds. In those days I was a stalwart and even gigantic specimen of an Australian pioneer, little given, as you may imagine, to idle dreaming and hysterical fancy. In fact, I have always had a strong conviction that uncanny sounds, spectral visitors, wondrous dreams, and suck-like visionary matters were the result of optical illusion or mental derangement, or else were attributable to some very simple, or even ludicrous cause. The stories I am about to relate, however, do not accord with my theories or the theories of anyone else. For myself I offer no explanation of these things; but I will simply proceed to tell in a straightforward manner the details of the affairs precisely as they happened.