The boarding house stood on the edge of Boulder, its

corrugated iron roof catching the last rays of sunlight

like copper pennies. It was a place of openness and

honesty in a hard world, an island sanctuary amongst

the poppet heads and rusty iron that defined the gold‐

fields. Here, the Butler family kept their doors open to

miners, drifters, and dreamers—anyone who needed a

bed and a warm meal in the unforgiving desert land‐

scape of Western Australia.

It was into this world, in April of 1926, that murder

would come. But the seeds of that murder had been

planted years before, in the mud of France, where good men had learned the price of survival.