I was so tickled with this letter—there was something so funny in its
cool audacity, and the whole circumstances—that I at once inserted it
in the _Beacon_.
About a fortnight later, I received a second letter, which ran pretty
much like:
SIR—It must necessarily be the fate of all public men to
encounter much misrepresentation, and I must just submit, I
suppose, like others. At the same time, when there is a remedy
at hand, a man is merely doing himself justice in availing
himself of that remedy. I appeal, therefore, simply to your
sense of right and fair-play in requesting you to publish my
flat and emphatic denial to a paragraph which appeared in
the Sydney papers of last Friday—namely, that in the recent
encounter with troopers, one of my mates was wounded in the
arm. Nothing of the sort took place, thanks to the clumsy
shooting of our opponents. The same paragraph also states that
in the last sticking-up of the Binda Flat mail we treated our
prisoners with much harshness. The very reverse of this was the
actual case, and this statement can only have emanated from
persons wilfully and maliciously determined upon prejudicing
myself and my comrades in the public mind.—I remain, yours, &c.,