A MOUNTAIN FEUD.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 135, 9 June 1926, Page 8

A MOUNTAIN FEUD.

LEADS TO WILD FIGHT.

VICTORIAN MELEE.

CONSTABLE ATTACKED.

(From Our Own Correspondent.)'

SYDNEY, June 4.

An outcome of * feud between two families living ia the hills near Foster, Victoria, was a dramatic episode in the town itself on Monday afternoon, in which a policeman had tt? fight for his life and the whole town apparently took sides. Foster is a quiet little town in the heart of Gippsland, and anyone who entered the town on Tuesday afternoon might well have thought that the place had been taken over for the filming of a moving- picture. It all started when a faun labourer rode into town from the hills, and, without bothering to dismount, dashed into the dining room of the Exchange Hotel. The occupants of the dining room gasped with astonishment, but though efforts were made to get him to leave at once, he refused to dismount.

The licensee sought the assistance of Constable Gardiner, who was spending a holiday in Poster. Constable Grant, the local policeman being absent of duty in Melbourne at the time.

Gardiner had no sooner obtruded himself into the matter than a fight started, in which everyone in the hotel took part. Gardiner was attacked by three men in the passage and was getting a bad time of it when other onlookers took his side. Stand-up fights raged in the dining room and in the passage, the din being terrific.

An unloaded revolver, was obtained from a bank nearby, and it was handed to Constable Gardiner. He ordered his assailants" to put up their hands, and for a few minutes order was restored. But a stranger crept behind Gardiner and tackled f him from the rear, the revolver being wrested from him and handed to the farm labourer who had originally ridden into the place.

Then the melee broke out afresh. The men who had been covered by the gun rushed at Gardiner again, and one man, who had the gun, said, "I've got the gun now, and I'll blow his brains out."

With that he presented the revolver at the hotelkeeper's chest and pulled the trigger. Only a click resulted. Sweeping the crowd with the muzzle, he pulled the trigger again and again, with the same empty result. Then the horseman and hie associates set on Constable Gardiner again, chasing him into the street, and pursuing him up and down the hilly country in the vicinity. There seems little doubt that they would have beaten him unmercifully buit for the arrival of Constable Grant, who fired a shot into the ground at their feet and scared them off.

One man has been arrested and charged with having unlawfully assaulted Constable Gardiner, using indecent language, behaving in an offensive manneT, stealing a pistol, and carrying a pistol without a permit, while another man, alleged to have taken the lending part in the melee, is still being sought. He escaped into the hills. The feud which is at the genesis of the trouble was thought to have been =fittled -months ago. when two men, one from each of the warrine families, met : n n stand tip fisrht at Foster.