The son of an honest local magistrate on the north coast of New South Wales becomes the innocent spectator of opium-smuggling in the days when 'there were no breech-loaders in Australia.' A wealth of detail almost suggests personal knowledge of the trade, and the narrator's attitude to the law, represented by a police posse including an Irish trooper who betrays the smugglers, is ambivalent. The smuggling neighbours are sympathetically portrayed, but though they escape overseas, the cost of betrayed trust and lost friendship to the narrator's family is emphasised.
