“On that account it will be all the more interesting to me; and, from what you say, it is just the sort of place I should have chosen to squat upon.”
“By the by,” interrupted my friend, looking a little grave as he spoke, “your making use of that familiar phrase, recalls the circumstance you mentioned just now. Did I understand you to say, there was a squatter on the land?”
“There was one—so the agent has told me; but whether he be still squatted there, the official could not say.”
“Rather awkward, if he be,” rejoined my friend, in a sort of musing soliloquy; while, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he kept pulling his “goatee” to its full length.
“In what way awkward?” I asked in some surprise. “How can that signify?”
“A great deal. These squatters are queer fellows—ugly customers to deal with—especially when you come to turn them out of their house and home, as they consider it. It is true, they have the pre-emption right—that is, they may purchase, if they please, and send you to seek a location elsewhere; but this is a privilege those gentry rarely please to indulge in—being universally too poor to purchase.”
“What then?”
“Their motto is, for ‘him to keep who can.’ The old adage, ‘possession being nine points of the law,’ is, in the squatter’s code, no dead-letter, I can assure you.”
“Do you mean, that the fellow might refuse to turn out?”
“It depends a good deal on what sort of a fellow he is. They are not all alike. If he should chance to be one of the obstinate and pugnacious kind, you are likely enough to have trouble with him.”