Cat's Paw

<p>The boarding house stood on the edge of Boulder its</p><p>corrugated iron roof catching the last rays of sunlight</p><p>like copper pennies. It was a place of openness and</p><p>honesty in a hard world an island sanctuary amongst</p><p>the poppet heads and rusty iron that defined the gold‐</p><p>fields. Here the Butler family kept their doors open to</p><p>miners drifters and dreamers-anyone who needed a</p><p>bed and a warm meal in the unforgiving desert land‐</p><p>scape of Western Australia.</p><p>It was into this world in April of 1926 that murder</p><p>would come. But the seeds of that murder had been</p><p>planted years before in the mud of France where good</p><p>men had learned the price of survival.</p>