We were glad at first to hear, and see, and smell, and feel the rain,

but when it steadily poured on we began to feel alarmed. Part of Jerry's

Town stood on a little rise, but more than half of it was nearly on a

level with Jerry's Flats; and those, according to black fellows'

tradition, had once been the bottom of a lake. There was good reason,

therefore, to feel anxious when the rain kept coming down in an almost

unbroken mass, and we could tell, from the rapid way in which the

Kakadua and the creek rose, that up the country, too, the rain was

falling in the same wholesale fashion. The people who lived in the huts

on the Flats, and who had pitched their farmhouses along the river-banks

for the sake of the rich alluvial soil, had still more reason to be

anxious. By Thursday night there were great sheets of water, constantly

getting closer to one another, out upon the Flats; the ferry-punt at the

mouth of the creek had been swept away; and the muddy flood was washing

up into the town. Mark Tapley would have found it hard work to be jolly

on that Thursday night, if he had been in Jerry's Town. The flooded-out

people from the lower part of the township and the outlying huts came

crowding up, like half-drowned rats, to shelter in the church or the

Court House, the police-barracks or the inns, or wherever else they

could find refuge; and the waters came after them at a rate that made it

doubtful whether they had not merely postponed their doom. Dim lights

twinkling far off over the waste of dimly-seen waters were only

comforting for a minute. How long--you thought the next minute--will

they be able to go on burning? In spite of the rush of the down-pouring

rain, the wail of the wind, and the roar of the ever-rising flood, we

heard every now and then the crack of an alarm gun, and fancied at any

rate that we heard a wild "cooey" for help or a wilder woman's scream.

Just as dawn broke on Friday the new bridge across the Kakadua went with

a crash. (The flood had risen as high as the flooring, and eddied across

it, the night before.) The swollen river dashed the big trees it had

pulled up like radishes against the bridge like battering-rams. The

middle of the roadway caved in; down dropped the arches above the

roadway, taking suicidal "headers;" on rushed the heavily-laden river;

and in a few minutes a momentary glimpse of a truncated bankside pile

was all that was to be seen of the fine bridge which "the hon. member

for the Kakadua" had made the Colonial Treasurer pay for in his

"Budget." The remembrance that they had not paid for it themselves

comforted the Jerry's Towners a little when the bridge was whirled away,

but it had scarcely ceased to be visible before they began to denounce

the Government for squandering the "people's money" on scamped work like

that, and the hon. member for Kakadua sank as rapidly in the opinion of

his Jerry's Town constituents as the Kakadua rose before their eyes. He

was a "duffer," after all, they said, and only shammed to look after the

"estimates."

But that was no time to go into politics. More than half of Jerry's Town

was under water; and Jerry's Flats were a huge lake, with here and there

a clump of trees, or a single tree-top, a chimney, a roof, a yard or two

of fencing, or a tiny island of higher ground, showing above the

troubled water. Dead horses, bullocks, sheep, pigs, poultry, and bush

beasts and birds, little trees, big trees, rafts of branches and

brushwood, great mats of withered grass and weeds, rushes and reeds,

large clods of red earth, harness, furniture, bark roofs, slab and

weather-board sides and fronts of huts and houses, verandah-posts, stray

stacks, and wrecks of all kind, were everywhere tossing and jostling;

but in the current of the river they were hurried on in such a grinding

bumping mass that, even if the water had not run so rapidly, it would

have been a most perilous task to pull a boat across the stream. A boat

or two did manage to cross it, however, thanks to bold clever steering,

although they were whisked along like chips for a mile or so before they

could get out of the current. Every boat left unswamped in Jerry's Town

was out soon after daybreak on that Friday morning. The police-boat got

away first, and it was queer to see it steering between the roofs that

alone marked out the lower end of George Street, pulling right over the

pound at the bottom of Pitt Street, and then giving a spurt into the

open water across the drowned butcher's paddock. All the boats had

adventures that, I think, would interest you but, of course, you guess

that Harry and Donald formed part of a rescue party, and therefore I

will tell you their adventures, as I heard them, partly from the boys,

and partly from the men they went with.

Harry and Donald had begun to despair of getting afloat, because, of

course, when crews were made up, stronger arms than boys' were picked,

and the boats had no room for outward-bound passengers, every inch of

room being needed for the poor people they were going to rescue. But the

Doctor had a ramshackle old four-oared tub, in which he sometimes

pottered about in the creek by himself. It was rowing under

difficulties, for the Doctor found it hard work to lug the heavy old

literal "torpid" along, and every now and then he had to stop pulling,

and set to work at baling. For some reason, however, the Doctor was very

proud of his tub; and, the instant the creek began to rise, he had her

hauled up his garden, which sloped down to the creek, and laid up in

ordinary in his verandah.

There she was lying when the boys came upon two men, who were looking at

her somewhat disconsolately. One was the landlord of the "General

Bourke," and the other was the Jerry's Town shoemaker.

"I doubt if she'd float, Tommy," said the landlord; "and besides, she

hain't got ne'er a rudder."

"Oh, we could stuff summat in here and there," answered the shoemaker,

"an' we could steer her better with a oar, an' some little cove will be

game to bale."

Harry and Donald at once offered their services, but just then the

Doctor came out.

"I'm willing to risk the boat," he said, "but I must pull stroke."

"No, Doctor, you must stay ashore," replied the landlord with a grin.

"There's plenty as can pull a oar your fashion, but you're the only one

than can do doctor's work. An' it ain't so much about risking the boat,

as risking the lives of them as goes in her. Hows'ever, one o' these

young coves from Wonga-Wonga will do to bale, an' then we only want two

to pull and another to steer--that's three; an' surely there must be

three men besides yourself, Doctor, in Jerry's Town game enough to jine

us, though it _ain't_ much better than a sieve."

But such was the reputation of the Doctor's tub that the three were not

forthcoming. Harry and Donald, however, were more eager than ever to

embark.

"Do you know anything about a boat, boys?" asked Boniface solemnly, as

if he was putting a question out of the Catechism.

"I should think we did," answered Harry, "a precious sight more than a

good many of your Jerry's Town loafers; we've got a boat of our own at

Wonga-Wonga."

"Ay, but can you do anything in her?"

"We can pull her, and steer her, and sail her," answered Harry, proudly;

"I'm not bad in a boat, and Donald is better."

Boniface scratched his head for a minute in perplexity, and then said,

"Tommy and me will risk it, Doctor. We'll cobble her up a bit, an' one

on 'em can bale, an' t'other try his hand at steerin', an' p'r'aps, at a

pinch, both on 'em can pull a bit. Lawson ain't a bad sort. He won't

mind us takin' his boys, will he, Tommy? Anyhow, I don't like to see

anything that calls itself a boat a-doin' nothing, an' them poor

critturs squealin' out yonder--good customers o' mine some on 'em is,

ain't they, Tommy? So you come along, young gentlemen, if you're

willin', an' we'll bring you back as sound as a roach, if you'll be sure

to mind what I tell ye."

The boys were sharp enough to see that "Dutch courage" had something to

do with the landlord's heroism, and with Tommy's too; but they could see

also that the men could tell well enough what they were about; so, as

soon as the boat had been hastily caulked with an old hat or two, and

dragged and pushed down the few yards that then separated her from the

water, off the four started. In spite of all they could do, however,

their craft floundered about in a very tublike fashion, and was nearly

wrecked at starting against a hut flooded up to the bark eaves. The

water eddied round this hut, and banged the boat up against it, and

then, as soon as she was got off again, she ran foul of a floating

Chinese hog, so swollen that it looked like a little hippopotamus; and

next she was caught in a float of driftwood, and she had to run the

gauntlet between all kinds of snags and sawyers. But at last she got

away into more open water, and all four pulled with a will over the

muddy, scummy waves towards a roof on which they fancied they could see

some people clustered. It was the roof of a little farmhouse, and when

the boat's crew reached it, they found the farmer clinging to the

chimney, and waving his shirt as a signal of distress (he had _cooeyed!_

until he had cracked his voice and was almost black in the face). His

wife was crouching at his feet, doing her best to shelter her youngest

girl against the still heavy rain, and the other poor little children

were huddled on the roof-ridge, like a row of draggle-tailed roosting

fowls. It was hard work to get the boat alongside without staving her

in, and still harder to get all the family on board without capsizing

her; but all at length were safely embarked, and then the farmer said:

[Illustration: "THEY FOUND THE FARMER CLINGING TO THE CHIMNEY."]

"There's a poor thing out yonder with a kid--can't we take her?" He

pointed to a woman in her night-dress, up to her shoulders in water, on

the top of an old honeysuckle, and holding her baby above the flood in

her poor aching arms. But there was no room in the boat.

"We must come for her next trip," said Boniface.

"The tree will be gone before then," cried Donald; "we'll stay on the

roof here--won't we, Harry?--and then you can come back for us when

you've got the rest ashore."

"No, that won't do, will it, Tommy?" said the landlord; but the boys

were quite positive, and said it was a currish thing to leave the woman

there, and that they would make a fuss about it, if the boat didn't go

for her. Then the farmer said that, if anybody ought to stay, he

supposed he ought to; but he didn't seem very willing to stay, and his

wife cried, and said that he ought to think of his children, if he

didn't care for her; and the boys settled matters by scrambling on to

the roof.

"It warn't my doin's, mind," growled Boniface, as the boat pulled off

for the honeysuckle. The poor woman and her baby were saved, and only

just in time. A few minutes after they were taken off, the tree flung up

its roots as a diving duck flings up its feet. It was weary, dreary work

for the boys to cling to the chimney, watching the boat pulling for the

town, and waiting for it to come back for them. After all, it was not

the landlord and the shoemaker who rescued them. Boniface and Tommy had

worked off their "Dutch courage" in the first trip, and, besides, the

Doctor's tub would certainly have foundered if she had tried to make

another. But the police-sergeant had heard the story, and he had helped

to capture Warrigal in his private-trooper days, and had a great respect

for Harry.

"We'll go first for that game young Trojan," he said to his men; and the

farmer volunteered to take one policeman's place in the boat, that there

might be no mistake about the house. Harry's heart, and Donald's too,

gave a great leap of joy when they saw the police-boat steering as

straight as it could for them, over the brown waters, through the grey

rain. But, pleased as they were at getting on board the boat, they could

think of others. They told the sergeant that they thought they had seen

a fire and some people far away on a bit of dry ground.

"I'm out of my reckoning, now," said Harry; "but Donald thinks it must

be the top of Macpherson's Hill, on the Cornwallis Road; anyhow,

Macpherson's inn has gone."

"Give way, lads," cried the sergeant; and he steered the long

police-boat towards the spot his young passengers had pointed out. It

was a long hard pull, and the boat took up other passengers before she

got to the end of it. She took off a man from a shea-oak, and a woman

and two children he had lashed to branches higher up. The man had been

made quite stupid by the terrible time he had had. It was as much as two

policemen could do to drag him off the branch to which he clung, and

then he tumbled into the boat like a sack of sand. When the poor

scratching, screaming woman was got into it, she had to be tied again,

because she had gone mad. About half a mile farther on, the boat came to

a hut flooded up to the eaves; and "Whisht!" cried Donald (as if the

rain and wind and chopping waves would mind him), "there's a body in

there."

Nobody else had heard anything to show it, but the sergeant steered the

boat alongside the roof, and then they all heard thumps against it, and

muffled shouts of "Holy murther! Hooroo! Bad luck to ye!" They pulled

the sheets of sodden bark off, and pulled out an old Irish shepherd, who

had been bumping up against the rafters, astride upon a box, with a

rum-bottle in his fist, like the publican's Bacchus on his barrel.

The water shoaled as the boat neared the top of Macpherson's Hill. On

the sloppy ground a score or two of men, women, and children had

congregated and had managed to light a fire. They had two or three

pannikins and some bottles and quart pots amongst them, and were

drinking and handing one another tea and grog in a strange, stupefiedly

tranquil fashion. There were snakes on the little island also, but they

were too scared to bite; and drenched native cats, and quail, and

bush-rats, and swamp-parrots, and bandicoots, and diamond-sparrows, and

lizards, and spiders, and scorpions, and green and yellow frogs, and

centipedes, and praying Mantises, were muddled up in a very miserable

"happy family."

As soon as the people on the little island saw that the boat grounded

within a couple of yards of its brink, they woke up from their trance,

and rushed into the water, clamorously demanding that either themselves,

or somebody they cared for more than they did for themselves, should be

carried off first. The sergeant had to make his men back water, and

threaten to carry nobody, before he could quiet the poor bewildered

creatures, made drunk by sudden hope. Then they, together with the Irish

shepherd, were carried over by instalments to a point of undrowned land

nearer than what remained above water of Jerry's Town (Harry and Donald

meanwhile staying on the island, and tucking into the tea and stale

damper given them, for they were as hungry and thirsty as hunters). Then

the boat at last came back, and carried them to Jerry's Town, with the

man and woman, and two scared shivering little children that had been

taken off the shea-oak.

The rain did not cease until the following Thursday, and although, when

it did cease, the flood went down almost as rapidly as it had risen, a

fearful amount of damage had been done on and about Jerry's Flats.

Several lives had been lost. Scores of acres had been washed away

bodily, or smothered in white sand. Houses, huts, sheds, fences, had

utterly vanished. The flooded buildings that had stood out the flood

looked like sewers when the waters went down. A good many of the

"cockatoo settlers" were temporarily ruined, and had to petition the

Government, through the hon. member for the Kakadua, for seed-corn;

living, and re-making some kind of a home meanwhile, on the alms they

got from the relief committees. But on the other hand, some of the

river-side farms were made richer than ever by the shiploads of fat soil

that had been left on them, and it was like magic to see how rapidly the

bush, that had been as dry as a calcined bone a few days before, became

green again when the sun shone out once more.

"A nice climate yours is, isn't it?" I said to Harry, when we were

talking over our flood adventures.

"Look at the country now," he retorted, triumphantly. "You couldn't beat

that in slow old England, where it's always dribbling. It _does_ rain

here when it does rain, and then it's over."

"Hech, lad! we should be nane the waur o' a little mair equal division,"

commentated the more cautiously patriotic Donald, who talked mongrel

Scotch when he became philosophical. "It wasna sae gey fine when we

grippit the lum out yonder."

VIII.

A BUSH GRAVE.

One day Harry and Donald had been sent a good way from home to drive in

a small mob of cattle, to swell the large one which Mr. Lawson was

mustering at Wonga-Wonga for another overland trip to Port Phillip. The

shortest cut to where they expected to find the cattle was over a high

ridge--so high that on the crest there were very few trees, and those

very little ones, sheltering in hollows like sentries in their boxes. In

winter snow lies on the ridge, but it was not winter then, and the boys

and their horses both thought the air deliciously cool, and the short

grass and tiny Alpine herbs deliciously green, when they had scrambled

up the rugged mountain-track, and stood panting on the top. A great

ocean of dark wood, with here and there a shoal-like patch of flat or

clearing, spread on all sides beneath them. Of course, the cattle were

not to be driven home that way, but to be headed round a spur of the

ridge that ran into the plain at its foot seven or eight miles off. An

easy gully there ran through the range of hills. As the boys went down

the ridge, however, they saw a mob of cattle, wild cattle, some turned,

and some born so. The "Rooshians" stood stock-still for a minute,

looking at the intruders with red angry eyes, as if they meditated a

charge; but the boys cracked their stockwhips, and then off went the

Rooshians, shaking the ground as they thundered along. The boys saw a

little mob of wild horses, too--descended from stray tame ones, like the

American mustangs. Only one of these, a mare, seemed ever to have been

even nominally tame. There was just a trace of a brand on her off flank;

but the rest apparently had never had their skins scarred by a

branding-iron, or their hoofs singed or cramped with a shoe. There were

three or four mares in the mob, and a stallion, and a score or so of

foals of different sizes. They were all as plump as plums, and yet they

galloped off like the wind, with their long tails sweeping the ground,

and their great curly manes tossing like waves about their necks and

eyes.

A little farther down the boys came to a hollow full of kangaroo-grass,

and a mob of mouse-coloured, deer-eyed kangaroo were camped in it. Some

were nibbling the spiky brown grass, with their fore feet folded under

them like hill sheep. Some were patting one another, and tumbling one

another over like kittens. Others were watching in a ring two "old men"

that were fighting. One of the boxers was a nearly grey "old man," with

a regular Roman nose; the other was darker and younger, but nearly as

tall, and so he did not intend to let old Roman-nose cock over him any

more. The old does were looking on as if they hoped their contemporary

would win, but the darkie seemed the favourite of the young "flying

does." The two bucks stood up to each other, and hit out at each other,

and tried to get each other's head "into chancery" in prize-ring style;

but sometimes they jabbered at each other, just like two Whitechapel

vixens, and they gave nasty kicks at each other's bellies, too, with

their sharp-clawed hind feet. They were so taken up with their fight

that they let the boys watch it for nearly five minutes. When they found

out, however, that they were being watched, they parted sulkily, and

hopped off to "have it out" somewhere else, as fighting schoolboys slope

when they see a master coming, or fighting street-boys when they see a

policeman. After them hopped the rest of the mob, and Harry and Donald

gave chase to one of the does. She had come back to pick up her "Joey."

The little fellow jumped into her pouch head foremost like a harlequin,

and then up came his bright eyes and cocked ears above the edge of the

pocket, and away Mrs. Kangaroo went with her baby. She tried hard to

carry him off safe, but the boys had got an advantage over her at

starting, and threatened to head her off from the rest of the mob. Into

her apron-pocket went Mrs. Kangaroo's fore paw, and out came poor little

Master Kangaroo. The mother was safe then, but it would have been easy

to capture the fat, half-stunned baby. The boys, however, did not wish

to encumber themselves with a pet, and, besides, they could not help

pitying both the baby and his mamma. So they turned their horses' heads,

and presently, when they looked back, they saw the doe watching them,

and then bounding to pick up once more the Joey she had "dinged."

By-and-bye the boys came to the head of a fern-tree gully, and plunged

into its moist, warm, dim, luxuriant jungle, overshadowed by gigantic

trees. Even what they call the "dwarf" tea tree ran up there to more

than one hundred feet. They rode under blackwood trees, twenty feet

round at the ground, and without a branch on the straight bole for

eighty feet, beech trees two hundred feet high, and gum trees with tops

twice as high as theirs. Huge creepers draped and interlaced those

monsters. Some of the fern trees were more than fifty feet high, and

above the feathery fans of the little ferns great stag-horns spread

their antlers, and nest-ferns drooped their six-foot fronds. There were

fragrant sassafras trees, too, in the gully, and the gigantic lily

pierced the jungle with its long spear-shaft.

As the boys were forcing their way through it on their horses, with many

a scratch and damp smack in the face from the swinging boughs, they came

suddenly upon a little square of broken-down, almost smothered fencing.

Inside there was more jungle, but a rough wooden cross showed them that

they were looking at a bush grave. Initials and a date had been rudely

carved upon the cross, but an A and 8 were all that could be made out of

them. The boys had never heard of any one buried there, and it made them

very serious at first to find a forgotten grave in that lonely place.

They got off their horses, and took off their hats, and stood looking at

the grave for some minutes in silence. Then they mounted again, and rode

on, feeling, until they got out of the gully, as if they had been at a

funeral. They had other things to think about when they rode into the

sunshine again. They had the cattle to look up, and a camping-place to

pick, because they were not going back to Wonga-Wonga until next day.

But when they sat by their fire in the evening, with the weird

night-wind moaning in the bush and sighing through the scrub around

them, their thoughts went back to the bush grave.

[Illustration: "A ROUGH WOODEN CROSS SHOWED THEM A BUSH GRAVE."]

"_We_ may die some day like that, Donald," said Harry, "without a soul

to know where we're buried. It seems dreary somehow, don't it?"

"Somebody maun hae kenned where that puir fellow was buried," answered

logical Donald, "because he couldna hae buried himsel', and put that

cross up, and cut his name on't."

"Ah, perhaps the other fellow murdered him," cried Harry. "And yet he'd

hardly have put the cross up, if he had. No, I expect there were two of

them out going to take up new country, just as you and me may be out

some day, and one of 'em died. It must have been dreary work for the

other chap then, and perhaps he died all by himself, and nobody knows

what became of _him_."

When the boys got back to Wonga-Wonga with their cattle, they made

inquiries about the grave in the fern-tree gully, but no one else on the

station had either seen it or heard of it before. Old Cranky, the men

said, was the only one likely to know anything about it. The old man

happened to come to Wonga-Wonga three days afterwards, and Harry at once

began to question him about the grave. At first Old Cranky seemed not to

understand what he was being asked--then a half-sly, half-frightened

look came into his face, and he said that he knew every foot of the Bush

for many a mile anywhere thereabouts, and he was sure there wasn't a

grave in it. Then he said he had never been in _that_ gully; and then he

said, Oh yes, he had, and there was a grave in it years back--he

remembered now--why, it was an old mate of his--they had been lagged

together and had cut away together, because the cove was such a Tartar,

and Squinny had knocked up, and it was _he_ who had buried him there,

and put up a cross to keep the devil off. He remembered it now as if it

had all happened yesterday.

"And is it up yet?" the old man went on. "My word! a A and a 8? Oh, the

A was for Andrew--that was Squinny's name--Andrew Wilson. Didn't you see

ne'er a W? I mind the knife slipped, an' I cut my finger makin' it. 8?

Let's see--it was 18, summut 8, or was it 17? when I buried Squinny."

And then Old Cranky burst out laughing, and said that he had been

gammoning Harry all through--_he_ knew nought about the grave, and

didn't believe there was one. Harry had been spinning him a yarn, and so

he had spun Harry one to be quits.

All this was very queer, but Old Cranky was so very queer that Harry

didn't think much of it, coming from him. But when Harry told Donald

about it, Donald looked very suspicious, and said,

"Anyhow, when we've a chance, we'll go and see whether there _is_ a W on

the cross. Where is Old Cranky?"

"I left him yarning away in the horsebreaker's hut," answered Harry; but

when the boys strolled down there, they found that Old Cranky had left

the station without coming up as usual to the house. Two days afterwards

he came back, and as soon as he saw Harry he called out,

"There, I knowed I was right. I've been all through yon gully, and

there's no more a grave in it than there is in the back o' your hand.

You goo an' look again--I'll goo with you, if ye like."

But when the boys did go back to the gully, it was without Old Cranky.

They were not exactly afraid of him, but still they preferred the old

snake-charmer's room to his company in such a place. They thought they

could ride almost straight to the grave, but from top to bottom, and

from side to side, they rode through and through the gully without

finding again the broken fence and crumbling cross.

"We couldn't have been dreaming, Donald, could we?" asked Harry.

"Nay, lad," answered Donald, "but we shouldna hae let that auld

scoon'rel get the start of us. We'll not see him at Wonga-Wonga again,

in a hurry, I'm thinkin'."

But Old Cranky did turn up again there in a few weeks' time, and

chuckled greatly when he heard of the boys' unsuccessful hunt. That was

his last visit to Wonga-Wonga. A short time afterwards he was found dead

in the Bush, with his dogs standing over him, and his tame snakes

wriggling about him. He had died of old age merely, and was buried in

the Bush in which he had spent the greater part of his life. Old Cranky

had been the "oldest inhabitant" in that part of the colony; and when he

was gone, people began to rake up old stories of the old convict times

in which he had figured. One day a settler, to whose father Old Cranky

had been assigned, was dining at Wonga-Wonga, and telling us what he

remembered of the old lag.

"Had your father one Wilson?" asked Donald.

"Well, really, he had so many, and it's so long ago, that I can't

remember," said the gentleman.

"Was your father a Tartar?" was Donald's next very rude question.

"I dare say he was," the son answered laughingly, "and he had need to be

with such a set of scamps as he had to manage. If you hadn't kept your

eye on them, and let them feel the weight of your hand now and then,

they'd have been on you like caged tigers when they see the tamer's

turning funky."

"If you can't remember a Wilson, can you remember a body that went by

the name of Squinny?" persisted Donald, like a barrister; "and did he

take to the Bush because he couldna stand the floggings he got?"

"Squinny! You're right. I do remember a man of that name. No, he didn't

take to the Bush. He was drowned crossing a creek--at least, that's what

the fellow that was out with him said. By-the-bye, it was this very Old

Cranky. But what do you know about him--what makes you ask?"

Then the boys told what they had seen and heard, and afterwards hadn't

seen. Everybody at table, of course, came to the conclusion that Wilson

had met with foul play in the gully from Old Cranky, and then been

buried there by him in the way he had described.

"If you could find the grave," said the settler, "I'll be bound you'd

find a cracked skull in it; but of course the old rascal cleared away

all tracks of the fence and the rest of it, when Harry put him up to

what he'd seen. Besides, what would be the good of finding out anything?

You can't hang the old villain now, and, if he was alive, you'd have

hard work to bring the thing home to him. The little I remember, and

what he told the boys, is about all the evidence you'd have, and really

I don't remember much, and the old scoundrel was always cranky. Besides,

candidly, I don't see that it would do much good to scrag one villain

for knocking another on the head all those years ago. The fellow would

have been dead by this time somehow, and perhaps Old Cranky did society

a good turn in finishing him off when he did. What do _you_ think, Mr.

Howe? I think, for my part, that a good many fellows that could be very

well spared have been settled in that way in the colony; just as the

ants, they say, eat up the rats and the cockroaches. The curious thing

is, that Old Cranky should have taken so much trouble to bury the man

decently, with the name and date, and all the rest of it, and then

forgotten all about it. But he was always a comical coon, was Old

Cranky. A native wouldn't have done a silly thing like that, Mr. Howe.

We're up to time of day; ain't we, Harry?"

"Anyhow, we're a deal better than the English, though I didn't know you

called yourself a native," answered Harry. "We shouldn't have any scamps

in the colony if it wasn't for the lot they sent us out from home;

though, after all, the old hands are twice the men the new chums are

that come nowadays. A set of stuck-up milksops! They don't know

anything, and they can't do anything, and yet they talk as if they'd

done the colony a great honour in coming to it, to be always growling at

it because they ain't 'cute enough to get on here."

Harry and Donald did not make their appearance at the Wonga-Wonga

dinner-table next day. They had started early in the morning for the

fern-tree gully, with a pick and a spade, determined to make one more

effort to discover the grave and unravel its mystery.

For a long time their hunt was as fruitless as before, but at last Harry

cried out,

"I'm almost certain it was somewhere here! Don't you remember there was

a blue gum close by, with a hole that looked like a black fellow

grinning, half-way up? There's the tree--or else it's the image of it,

and I never saw two trees exactly alike before."

Donald got off his horse, and poked about in the scrub for some time.

Presently he said, "Ye're richt." He had been trying the ground with the

handle of the pick, and it had run into seven loosely filled-up,

hard-sided and hard-bottomed holes, arranged like this:

[Illustration: Diagram.]

"Don't ye see?" said Donald, pointing out the outside ones; "there's

where the posts stood, and this inside one is where the cross stood. The

auld villain didn't dig up the bones, though, if there _are_ any bones,

for the earth hasn't been stirred anywhere else."

The boys set to work with a will, and about five feet below the surface

they came to a rusty-yellow crumbling skeleton. There was nothing in the

look of the bones from which the boys, at any rate, could tell how their

owner had met his death. But they dug up also what turned out to have

been a white bone-handled pocket knife, when they had washed off the

earth that encrusted it. The blades were almost eaten up by rust; the

handle was the colour of bad teeth, and the rivets fell out, and it

dropped asunder as the boys handled it; but on one of the sides was

cut--"Andrew Wilson."

The boys put back the bones, and filled in the earth again, and knocked

up a rude fence once more round the grave. The sun went down as they

were finishing their task, and before they got out of the gully the huge

funguses at the foot of the shadowy trees were gleaming like

lucifer-matches in the dark, and the curlews were wailing most

dolefully. Both boys were very glad to ride out where there was nothing

between them and the clear starry sky.

"I wouldn't camp in there for a thousand pounds," said Harry, looking

back at the deep wooded gorge; and even Donald confessed that the place

seemed "nae canny."

IX.

THE OLD CONVICT TIMES.

The settler who remembered Old Cranky's antecedents was Mr. Walter

Daventry, son of a deceased Captain Daventry, who had moved up into the

Kakadua district from the sea-coast, where he had first made himself a

home. If I tell you something about Mr. Walter's boyhood, you will get a

notion of Australia in the old convict times. This Captain Daventry was

a military settler. When Mrs. Daventry, and her son Walter, and her maid

Phoebe, went out from England to join the captain on his grant, both

mistress and maid thought they were never to know what comfort was

again--that they were going, so to speak, to the world's back-yard, in

which all kinds of dirty rubbish were shot. Walter would have preferred

India or Canada; people teased him so when they learnt that he was going

to "Botany Bay"--asking him when he was sentenced to transportation--how

many years he had got--and a good many more such silly questions, which

they thought a great deal wittier than Walter did. Still, any change was

acceptable that would take him away from the dull little Norfolk town

that never seemed thoroughly awake, and its dark, long, low-pitched

grammar-school, in which two masters, in cap and gown, nodded over their

far-apart desks, and pretended to teach Walter and another small boy,

and tried to fancy that they were preparing a lanky hobbydehoy for the

University. Masters, hobbydehoy, and small boy all half-envied Walter,

in a drowsy kind of way, when one morning he burst into that gloomy old

school-room to say good bye. An hour afterwards he was rattling out of

the dreamy little town along the Ipswich road, _en route_ for London.

The coachman was making his leaders and the off-wheeler canter, the

guard was _tootle-tooing_ on his horn; the townspeople stood at their

doors and the inn gates, sleepily watching the coach that had come from

great Norwich and was going to still greater London, and sleepily waving

their hands to proud Walter, who had begged for an outside place,

instead of being shut up in the stuffy inside with Mamma and Phoebe and

an old gentleman, who wore a bandana under his fur travelling-cap, and

got out for refreshment at every inn at which the coach stopped to

change horses, munching ham sandwiches and drinking cold brandy and

water almost without intermission when the coach was in motion. Walter

had a much pleasanter companion in the coachman, behind whom he sat, and

who told him stories about the gentlemen's seats they passed, and gave

him the biographies of all the horses, and even let him hold the reins

sometimes, when Mr. Jehu got down at a roadside house to deliver a

parcel or drink a glass of ale. Walter enjoyed the first part of the

journey exceedingly, but he was very tired and sleepy before it was

over.

As the coach swung through Mile End turnpike, the coachman woke him up

with a back thrust of the butt-end of his whip, and said,

"Now, then, squire, you can reckon yourself in London."

Walter just opened his heavy eyes, and then shut them again--not

thinking much of the Great City, if _that_ was London. By the time the

coach got to its inn, he was so sound asleep again that a waiter had to

carry him up to bed. The ride from Norfolk to London, however, was

flying on eagles' wings compared with the voyage from London to Sydney.

In those days the magnificent steamers and sailing clippers that now

arrive almost daily at or from Australia had not been dreamt of. At long

intervals clumsy old tubs of ships and barques sailed for the far-off

southern land, pottered about for months at sea, and at last turned up

at the Antipodes, seemingly more through good luck than good management.

The barque in which our party sailed was named the _Atalanta_. Walter

had often read through the proper names at the end of his Latin

dictionary, and was greatly amused by the barque's flying name when he

found how she crawled. She had to put in at Plymouth, Lisbon, Bona

Vista, Rio, and the Cape. She was just half a year and half a month in

getting from the Nore to Port Jackson Heads.

Once inside the Heads, however, even Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe picked up

a little spirit, and Walter was in ecstasies. Both sky and water were so

brightly blue, the islands sprinkled on the water looked so pretty, and,

though the trees seemed almost as black as ink to English eyes, the

rocky, wooded shores, sweeping down to the little coves and bays,

beached with white sand that shone like silver under the glowing sun,

had a fairyland-like look. Sydney then had not the fine buildings it

boasts of now, but the town was so much more civilized in appearance

than Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe expected, and the little country houses,

that even then had begun to dot the south side of the harbour, were such

darling little nests, that both mistress and maid fell in love with

Sydney. Captain Daventry came on board as the _Atalanta_ let go her

anchor in Sydney Cove. He was very brown, and he had a long curly beard.

He was dressed more lightly than he would have been at home, but still

he was dressed, and like a gentleman. A horrid load was lifted from Mrs.

Daventry's mind, since she had half given in to Phoebe's belief that

Master would only wear a bit of 'possum or kangaroo skin about his

loins, and that he would carry a spear instead of a walking-stick. As

for Walter, he was very proud of the brown manly-looking Papa whom he

had not seen since he was almost a baby.

"Oh, Walter," cried Mrs. Daventry to her husband, when the kissing was

over, "I hope your farm is close by. I used to think that they sent the

convicts out here because it was a hideously ugly hole, but this is a

love of a place."

"It's nicer to look at than to live in," the captain answered. "What

with convicts and emancipists, you'd soon be sick of living in Sydney.

No, my grant is some miles up-country. There's a nasty swarm of

ticket-of-leavers round it, but, of course, you'll have nothing to do

with them. And then there are some good fellows of our sort within

reach--some of them married, too. What a time you've been! I was down

two months ago looking out for you. It's quite by chance I'm down now.

However, there'll be room on the dray for your luggage, if you haven't

brought out a ship-load, and we'll start home to-morrow, if one night

will be rest enough for you. I've been buying some horses, and you and

Walter can ride two of them, and help me to drive the rest. You'll be

better off than you were before you married me, old lady. You had only

one horse then, but I can give you your pick out of a dozen or two now.

Of course Walter has learnt to stick on a horse somehow, though you

couldn't keep a pony for him? The girl will have to learn to ride, too,

if she wants to get about up-country. In the meantime she can go up on

the dray. The bullock-driver is an assigned servant, but he's as true as

steel, and that's more than I can say for some of the beggars I've got."

But when the loaded dray was brought to the inn door next morning, with

a chair on it for Phoebe, she had learnt that assigned servant meant

convict, and refused at first to take her seat. She wasn't going to have

her throat cut with her eyes open, she screamed. The bullock-driver,

Long Steve, was a good-tempered fellow, and did his best to calm her.

"Why, law bless ye, miss," he said, "I've got an old 'ooman an' half a

dozen kids. What call have I got to do any harm to a pretty gal like

you?"

But flattery was thrown away on Phoebe. She entreated her mistress not

to leave her to the tender mercies of that wicked-looking man, and made

such a fuss that at last her master was obliged to say,

"Well, look here, Phoebe. If you don't go in the dray, you must either

stay in Sydney, or walk, or ride one of the horses. Take your

choice--which shall it be?"

Phoebe mounted the dray then, and though it was night when she reached

her journey's end, she was on quite good terms with Long Steve when he

helped her off the dray. She had been talking to him for hours, half

condescendingly, half propitiatingly, thinking all the time what a

capital adventure it would be to relate in her first letter home. In

that letter Phoebe made out that Long Steve had committed half a dozen

murders, whereas the honest fellow had never committed one. A great many

terrible scamps were sent out to Australia in the old convict times,

but, mixed up with them, there were men who were far better fellows than

many of the people left at home.

Late in the afternoon the Captain and his party reached his farm. "Oh,

what a first-rate broad!" Walter, fresh from Norfolk, exclaimed, when

the riders had mounted the top of the shore-hills, and were looking down

on the lagoon which the farm fringed--a lagoon with thickly-wooded

banks, cleared here and there, a little stream running into it at one

end, and at the other a sandy bar over which the sea was breaking.

Mrs. Daventry was delighted at first with her new home. A pretty

flower-garden sloped down to the lagoon, and the verandah of the snug

one-storey house of brick and weather-board was smothered in

passion-flower. The Captain had furnished the house as comfortably as he

could for his wife, and altogether it seemed a much smarter, livelier

place than the dark old house in the dull, grass-grown side-street of

the little Norfolk town where she had been economizing whilst her

husband was first doing military duty, and afterwards building this snug

nest in New South Wales. There was no need, apparently, to economize

now. Beef and mutton were the commonest of things at Daventry Hall.

Cream, butter, eggs, honey, pigs, poultry, fish and game were all to be

got, to almost any extent, upon the premises. Besides English

vegetables, there were pumpkins and sweet potatoes in the kitchen

garden. There was a nice vineyard, which Walter mistook at first for a

field of currant-bushes; and in the orchard there were raspberries and

strawberries and mulberries, pears and pomegranates, figs and plums and

loquats, oranges and lemons, peaches, apricots and nectarines, and

gigantic rock and water melons. Walter thought of the scanty pennyworths

of sour apples that he used to get in Norfolk, and for a week or two

devastated the orchard and the vineyard like a 'possum or a flying-fox.

As soon as it was known that Mrs. Daventry had arrived, the Captain's

friends and their wives rode over to Daventry Hall, and then there was a

round of dinners at the friends' houses, and then the Captain gave

dinners in return, and both Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe were delighted with

the gaiety. But when things settled into everyday course, and, as often

happened, Captain Daventry was away from home for hours together, they

both began to fall back into their old dread of Australia. Mrs. Daventry

had been proud at first of having so many servants inside and outside

the house, but it was not pleasant to remember that all except Phoebe

were convicts. Captain Daventry was a strict, but then not a severe

master, and so he got on pretty well with his assigned servants, but in

all their faces--except Long Steve's and his wife's--there was a

shallow, time-serving look, however cringingly civil they might be, that

was not assuring.

Walter did not trouble himself about such things. He made friends after

a fashion with the men, and rode about with his father to look after the

horses, and cattle, and sheep; the maize-paddock and the potato fields;

the clearers, the fencers, and the sawyers. His father soon let him go

about by himself, and then he _was_ a proud and happy boy. He could

scarcely believe that only a year ago he was stumbling through the

irregular and defective verbs in that gloomy old Norfolk school-room.

Walter could leap logs now far better than he could conjugate _Fio_ or

_Inquam_ then. Of course, his father or his mother gave him lessons

every now and then, but that was not like regular school, you know. Long

Steve had taught him to crack a stock-whip, and Long Steve's wife had

plaited him a cabbage-tree hat (in those days the lagoon was studded

with cabbage-tree palms), and Walter used to gallop through the bush

like a Wild Huntsman on his own three-parts blood chestnut Dragon-fly.

Sometimes he went out on foot with his little gun, and after a bit he

managed to shoot wallabies and kangaroo-rats, and quail and snipe, and

bronze-wings, and parrots and cockatoos to make pies of. Sometimes, too,

he took his gun out with him in the boat, and shot wild duck, and now

and then a black swan, on the lagoon. In the lagoon and the little

river, moreover, he caught eels and schnappers, and guard-fish, and

so-called bream, and mullet and trout, and delicious oysters. The

Captain was very proud of the way in which his little boy took to the

colony, but Mrs. Daventry was very anxious because he was out so much

alone.

One day, when the Captain and Walter rode home, they found Mrs. Daventry

and Phoebe almost dead with alarm. A party of blacks had taken

possession of the front verandah, on which they were jabbering and

gesticulating--rubbing their sides and poking their fingers down their

throats. Poor Mrs. Daventry and her servant thought that these were

signs that the blacks wanted to eat _them_, and therefore were ready to

faint from fear. The Captain soon bundled the black fellows off the

verandah, but he made it a point of policy to be kind to them, and so he

ordered the cook to supply them with tea and damper and mutton chops.

They ate and drank until even they could eat and drink no more, and then

remarking, with great self-satisfaction, that they had "budgeree big

belly," they drowsily tramped into the bush, and lay down in the sun to

sleep off their surfeit.

The black fellows were not grateful to the Captain for his kindness.

Unfortunately, they had tasted his potatoes, and thought them so nice

that they twice saved him the trouble of digging up his crop, and once

even scooped out and baked his seed-potatoes. The Captain did not want

to make enemies of the darkies, but he was obliged after that to give up

supplying them with chops and damper, except when they had fairly earned

them by working for them.

Far worse thieves than the black fellows, however, persistently preyed

on Daventry Hall.

All the assigned servants, except Long Steve and his wife, were habitual

thieves. They did not get any wages for their work, and so they thought

themselves free to help themselves to their master's property. So many

pounds of salt or fresh meat and flour, so much coarse brown sugar and

inferior tea, and a little tobacco, were the rations served out to each

man every week; but there was good living in the men's huts for all

that. China pigs, ducks, turkeys, &c., mysteriously disappeared. The men

made out that they had wandered into the bush, and been devoured by bush

beasts and birds, or else starved to death; but if Captain Daventry had

gone to the huts a little more frequently, instead of trusting, as he

did, to his overseer, the savoury scent that often issued from them

would have told him what had become of his poultry, &c. Walter noticed

the savoury steam one evening, but the overseer said that he had shot

some wild ducks, and given them to the men. The overseer was a

convict--a smooth-faced, smooth-tongued rascal. He was trusted to weigh

out the rations, and the men used to carry a good deal besides their

rations out of the store. The house servants, too, whenever they had a

good opportunity, would appropriate unguarded valuables. They had no

difficulty in disposing of them, since all the assigned servants, except

Long Steve and his wife, were in league with the ticket-of-leave farmers

round about. Most of these ticket-of-leavers were a thieving, drunken

lot. Some of them would reconvey their Government grants for a keg of

rum. As for conveyance of another kind--Pistol's--they did not rob one

another, but gentlemen-settlers they considered fair game. Captain

Daventry's bullocks found their way into the ticket-of-leavers'

beef-casks. They stole his best horses; they clapped their brands on his

best colts, fillies, and calves; they pastured their own horses and

cattle on his grant; through the villany of his overseer and convict

shepherds, they robbed him of his sheep wholesale. They had even the

impudence to steal Dragon-fly!

"Why, Daventry," said one of the Captain's friends one day, "what made

you sell that capital chestnut your little fellow used to ride? He

fetched a good price, though, I believe."

"_I_ didn't sell him," answered the Captain, moodily; "he was stolen. A

nice lot of neighbours we've got; however, I think I've scared 'em for

one while."

When Dragon-fly was first missing, the overseer had comforted Walter by

telling him that his horse could only have strayed a little way into the

bush, and was sure to turn up soon. Mounted on another nag, Walter rode

about for days in search of his favourite, but never saw him more.

Walter found out something, however. He was riding home very

dispiritedly one evening, when he noticed Black Poley--as one of his

father's shepherds who lived at an out-station was nicknamed, from the

resemblance his head bore to a hornless bullock's--mounting the rise on

the right of the gully in which Walter was riding. Walter could not

understand what Poley was doing there at that time of night, and having

been made suspicious by the loss of his horse, he pressed after Poley as

quietly as he could. By the time he topped the ridge it was nearly dark,

but he could make out Poley going down the other side of the ridge, and

another man coming up to meet him. Walter was a brave little fellow. He

tied his horse to a tree, and, slipping down the ridge, got within

earshot of the two men, who were sitting, smoking and talking, on a

fallen tree-trunk.

"Well, Poley, how many can you let me have this time?"

Poley gave a gruff laugh, and answered with an oath: "---- if I don't

try it on with three score! The cove is so jolly green, it's my belief

he'll never miss 'em. I began with twos an' threes, an' now I have

worked it up to a score, and I've al'ays got over the cove somehow. What

does sich as him know about sheep an' farmin'? ---- if I don't try

_four_ score--good yows, too; so you must stand something handsome."

"To-morrow morning then, at the old place--Sal's Pannikin."

"All right! I'll work round there about an hour after sunrise."

Then something was said about the overseer; but what, Walter could not

make out. Not waiting to hear any more, he crept back to his horse,

mounted, galloped home, and told his father what he had heard. At first

the captain was going to consult with the overseer; but one or two

little things recently had rather shaken his confidence in the overseer,

and so he sent for Long Steve instead. Long Steve knew Sal's Pannikin

well. It was a lonely hollow in an unoccupied part of the bush, and was

called Sal's because on its brink a Mrs. Sarah Mullins had once kept a

most disreputable sly drinking-house. Strange goings on had taken place

there. At last the landlady had been brutally murdered in her own house,

and after that it was allowed to go to ruin, and had the reputation of

being haunted.

"What was the other man like, Master Walter?" asked Long Steve.

Walter could only say that he talked very much as if he had a hot potato

in his mouth.

"Oh, that's little Dick Green, at the head of the lagoon," cried Long

Steve, half disappointed at not having found a worthier foeman. "It's

hard, Cap'en, if you an' me can't nab little Dick Green an' the Poley."

"Would you like to go, Walter?" said the Captain. "I think it's only

fair that you should see the fun."

Of course Walter wanted to go. So it was arranged that Steve should have

tea and chops ready, and three horses saddled, at his hut (which stood

apart from the other men's), and call his master and Walter at half-past

two next morning. The Captain thought it advisable to start thus early,

in case the sheep-stealers should have changed their minds after Walter

left them, and agreed to meet at an earlier hour for safety's sake.

Walter greatly enjoyed his early breakfast by the wood fire in Long

Steve's hut, and the silent ride through the bush--all three armed. But

when they had put up their horses in Sal's ruined stables, and were

crouching in Sal's roofless parlour, on the cracked hearthstone of which

a frog was croaking dolefully, the adventure did not seem quite so jolly

to Walter.

But presently, while it was still quite dark, a light came dancing down

the other side of the hollow. Long Steve sallied out to reconnoitre.

When he came back he said,

"Yes, it's little Dick, sure enough, busy finishing off his

brush-hurdles. He'll soon ha' done, and then you and me, Cap'en, had

better creep down to the fold whilst it's yet dark. Master Walter can

stay here with the horses, and bring 'em down when we _cooey_. Oh, yes,

Cap'en, he'll be safe enough. Neither Dick nor the Poley would set a

foot in here if you'd give them a thousand pounds."

In spite of this assurance, Walter wearied of his lonely vigil.

At length the eastern sky brightened, the laughing-jackasses hooted out

their hideously hilarious morning chorus, and the sun came up, bronzing

the scrub and the tree-tops. Walter could see Dick quite plainly now. He

was lying on the ground smoking his pipe. Then came another weary watch,

but at last up started little Dick and went to meet Black Poley, who was

coming down to the Pannikin with the stolen sheep. They were all driven

into the fold, and the two thieves were quietly talking together, when,

as it seemed to Walter, from beneath their very feet the Captain and

Long Steve jumped up like Jacks-in-the-box. The Captain felled Black

Poley as if he had been indeed a bullock. Long Steve laid little Dick on

his back as if he had been a child of four years old. By the time Walter

had obeyed the cooey and galloped down with the horses, both thieves had

their arms strongly bound behind them with green hide. With strips of

the same they were fastened to the Captain's and Long Steve's stirrups,

and then driving the ewes before them, the three thief-takers set out

for home. As Long Steve had expected, they found the rest of the flock

on the other side of the ridge that sloped down into Sal's Pannikin.

The overseer turned as white as a sheet when his master rode up to

Daventry Hall with his sheep and his prisoners, but neither Dick nor the

Poley peached.

Black Poley was sentenced to an awful flogging before he was sent back

to Sydney, and little Dick got ten years in a chain-gang. The Captain

thought now that his property would be safe for a while, but he was

utterly mistaken. He had only weeded out two scoundrels, whose places

were almost instantly supplied by two at least as bad; he had managed to

focus the hatred of the district on himself, and, moreover, just then

Hook-handed Bill and his gang came on circuit, so to speak, to the

country round the lagoon. They had made their last _habitat_ rather too

hot to hold them, and with secure hiding-places in the range of

shore-hills, they promised themselves some rich raids on the

gentlemen-settlers who were dotted here and there around the lagoon.

Hook-handed Bill was a bushranger, without any of the redeeming

qualities which a certain set of story-tellers are so fond of giving to

robbers. He was a greedy, savage brute. Physically he was a left

handed-giant, who owed his _sobriquet_ to the fact that he had lost his

right hand, and supplied its place with a sharp hook. Horrid tales were

told of what that hook had done; "ripping up" was Hook-handed Bill's

favourite mode of murder. Burning alive in a bullock's hide stood next

in his estimation. It was said, too, that he was in the habit of

waylaying bullock-drivers on their way down to Sydney with their

masters' wool, of shamming to be on the best of terms with them, and

then murdering them wholesale in their sleep, afterwards disposing of

the wool through the agency of some of his ticket-of-leave friends.

Such a villain, with half a dozen followers only not quite so bad as

himself, was no pleasant bush neighbour. Some of the gentlemen-settlers

sent their wives and children into Sydney. All rode about armed by day,

and at night had their most valuable cattle driven into the stockyards,

and their favourite horses into the stables, whilst their houses were

turned into little forts. In spite of all precautions, the bushrangers

committed the most impudent robberies, and though some of the

gentlemen-settlers assisted the policemen in hunting the robbers, no

capture was made.

One afternoon, when Walter was in a lonely part of his father's grant, a

huge, shaggy-bearded, roughly-clad fellow sprang from behind a clump of

trees, and seized him by the collar. The stranger's right arm had no

hand, but brandished a sharp hook, and Walter thought that his last hour

was come. He was awfully frightened, but he tried not to seem so.

"Let me say my prayers first," said Walter.

Hook-handed Bill gave a grin which was even more hideous than his

habitual frown, as he answered,

"Time enough, youngster. I ain't a-goin' to kill you afore night. I want

you to take a message to your ---- father. He's a deal too cocky for my

taste, is the Captain, flogging his men, and lagging his neighbours, and

now he's been boasting that he'll take me dead or alive. Will he? We'll

soon see who's master. I'll show him how much I care for his blowing.

You take him Hook-handed Bill's compliments, and tell him that I give

him fair warning that I mean to pay him a visit to-night, and to

half-flog the life out of him and his sneak of a bullock-driver, and

then to string 'em both up--an' you, too, you ---- young spy!--an' to

carry off the womenfolk he's brought from ---- Old England to look down

on their betters. There! you be off, youngster!"

At first the Captain was inclined to treat the bushranger's threat as

mere bravado.

"However," he added, "if the rascal does choose to come, he could not

have consulted my convenience better. The police are coming over

to-night, Walter, my boy. We meant to have given the bushrangers a hunt

to-morrow morning, but if they like to save us the trouble, so much the

better. Don't say anything to your mamma, but go and call Long Steve."

The bullock-driver was firmly convinced that Hook-handed Bill would keep

his word, and advised his master to begin his preparations at once, in

case the bushrangers should hear from some of their scouts of the

intended police visit, and resolve to rush the house before the arrival

of the constables. Accordingly guns, pistols, ammunition, a sword, a

cutlass, and a bayonet were got in readiness by the Captain--not that he

really believed that there would be any use for them that night. The

kitchen clock struck seven--eight--nine, and still the constables did

not come. A little after nine the convict house-servants went away to

their huts, and Long Steve carefully bolted the doors after them. Mrs.

Daventry and Phoebe were persuaded to go to bed. The garrison of three

sat in silence--the Captain expecting every moment to hear the police

ride up; Long Steve and Walter, on the other hand, dreading the arrival

of the bushrangers. About ten a party of men _were_ heard galloping up.

"There they are!" cried the Captain, and before Long Steve could stop

him, he had opened the front door and run down to the garden-gate. "Why,

what a time you've been, Saunders," the Captain shouted to the supposed

police-sergeant.

"Have we?" growled back a gruff voice. "Well, we'll try to make up for

lost time, you ----!"

Discovering his mistake, the captain fired his pistol at the speaker,

and rushed back to the house. A hailstorm of lead soon rattled on the

weatherboards, and Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe got up and rushed about like

maniacs. The women's screams were not calculated to improve the Captain

and Long Steve's aim, and though they had the advantage of cover, and

Walter to load for them, and of the moon which came up presently, seven

to two are heavy odds. (The overseer and assigned servants said next

morning that they had been sound asleep--one, indeed, had heard a little

firing, but thought that it was the Captain out duck-shooting!) I am

afraid that the besiegers would have been the victors, had not a party

of the Captain's friends suddenly made their appearance. They had been

dining together about ten miles off, and a drunken convict had let out

in their hearing the intended attack on Daventry Hall. They had

instantly rushed to horse, and galloped the ten miles at racing speed.

The bushrangers turned tail when the new-comers poured a volley into

them. Five of the scoundrels, altogether, had been hit, but only one was

taken. When the prisoner was escorted to the nearest police-barracks

next day, the reason of the constables' non-appearance at Daventry Hall

the night before was discovered.

The escort were very much astonished to find no one at the barrack

gates, or in the barrack-yard. They were still more astonished to find

the sergeant and his men lashed down on the mess-room floor--all gagged,

pinioned, and fettered.

Hook-handed Bill had been fully aware of the Captain's arrangements with

the police, and had taken them by surprise in their lonely barracks

before he dispatched his insolent message by Walter.

Although the bushranger had been beaten off, he and his ticket-of-leave

allies continued to harass Captain Daventry. They did it to such an

extent--cruelly hamstringing and mutilating cattle and horses when they

did not choose to take the trouble to steal them--that Captain Daventry

soon found that he was losing money fast. Being a soldier, however, he

thought it would be disgraceful to give in to such "a lot of vermin,"

but Mrs. Daventry declared that she could not live any longer in

constant fear of her own life and her husband's. The Captain could face

bushrangers, but he could not stand hysterics. The Kakadua was then

"outside"--as the colonists used to call unsettled districts--but Mrs.

Daventry was willing to go thither when she found that bushrangers did

not think it worth their while to visit the district. The Captain took

up some good land on both banks of the river, and there--soured by his

experiences--he became the Tartar his son owned that he had been.

X.

PIONEERING.

When Sydney Lawson left home to take up new country for himself, there

happened to be no tutor at Wonga-Wonga, and so Harry and Donald were

allowed to go with the young squatter, both to keep them out of mischief

and to enlarge their "colonial experience." Besides, they would be of as

much use as, at least, a man and a half. The boys were away for months,

but they never grew tired of their long holiday, although they often had

to work hard enough in it. It was the thought that they were doing real

man's work, and yet holiday-making at the same time, that made the

holiday so jolly.

Just after sunrise one calm bright morning, the little expedition

started--Sydney, Harry, Donald, and King Dick-a-Dick's heir-apparent,

"Prince Chummy," on horseback, and in charge of a small mob of horses

and another of cattle, and two old hands in charge of the bullock-dray

that carried the baggage, stores, tools, nails, horseshoes, arms,

ammunition, &c. "Jawing Jim" and "Handsome Bob" were the _sobriquets_ by

which these two old hands were known--both given on the _lucus a non

lucendo_ principle, since Jim scarcely ever opened his mouth, and Bob

was nearly as black, and not nearly so good-looking, as Prince Chummy.

Jim was a Staffordshire man, and Bob was a Cockney. They were both good

bushmen, but they had both been sent out for burglary, and therefore

they may seem to have been strange guards for the commissariat-waggon,

though the spirit-cask _had_ another cask outside it as a precaution

against furtive tapping. But for one thing, they were pretty well under

the eye of the rest of the party; and for another, each watched the

other like duplicated Japanese officials. There was a long-standing

rivalry between them. Each sneered at the other's home exploits. When

Jem did open his lips to any one except his bullocks, it was generally

to launch some sarcasm at Bob, but in a tongue-fight he was rarely a

match for the ugly Londoner, whose lonely bush life had not cured him of

his Cockney glibness.

All the Wonga-Wonga-ites mustered to see the little party off--Mr.

Lawson riding with it for a mile or two. There was a little confusion at

starting. A young imported bull strolled up, angrily snuffing and

pawing, as if jealous of the superior size of the bullocks; and just as

they had begun to obey Jim's very strong language and oft-cracked long

whip, the little bull took a mean advantage, made a mad flank charge on

the middle yoke, and threw the whole line into disorder. Thereupon Bob,

who had made himself comfortable on the flour-sacks in the dray, began

to chaff his comrade, in his own elegant style, on his clumsiness.

"Call _your_self a bullock-driver?" Bob was saying, when an old shoe

that Mrs. Jones had thrown after Harry hit Bob in the face.

He was going to abuse Mrs. Jones then, but Jim growled out,

"Doan't get inta a scoat, lahd! It hit thee wheer tha ken't be hoort,"

and Handsome Bob had to subside into his flour-sack couch again,

silenced for once.

With much cracking of whips, trampling of hoofs, clanking of chains,

jingling of tin pots, grinding of wheels, and creaking of pole and

yokes, the expedition at last fairly got under way. We watched it go

down the rise, across the flat, and through the slip-panels that led

into the bush beyond; and then, when we could see nothing but the dust

above the tree-tops, Mrs. Lawson and Mrs. M'Intyre, who was visiting at

Wonga-Wonga, went into their bed-rooms--perhaps to pray for their boys'

safety.

I saw them start, but can only relate their adventures from what I heard

of them when the boys came back.

The settled country through which they passed would have seemed wild

enough to most English people, accustomed to hedged-in little fields,

fitting like patches in a patchwork quilt, with roads and lanes curving

between them, and railways running over them in the most rural places.

In this "settled country" there were miles without a fence, and our

pioneers generally camped out at night; although, when they came to a

public, or an "accommodation-house," with a paddock, about sundown, they

would have a night between sheets for a change, and when they chanced to

halt near a head-station at nightfall, they could make sure of hearty

hospitality, although not always of a bed. As they went on, the country

seemed wilder and wilder to their eyes, although perhaps we should not

have seen much difference.

When I went out to New South Wales, I expected, from what I had read in

guide-books, to see capital convict-made roads running through the

colony everywhere. What I found was a tolerable bit of road reaching as

far as Parramatta (not twenty miles from Sydney), but beyond that there

was nothing that we should call a road in England. Deep ruts running

right across the road; grey logs that the mail-cart used to bump over,

and black jagged tree-stumps that it used to graze against; the

smoothest bits of road like a ploughed field; unbridged creeks;

"corduroy" causeways of tree-trunks across swampy places;--that is what

I remember of Australian up-country roads in dry weather; and in wet

weather they were chains of ponds, with marsh that swallowed you to the

ankle, and bog that gobbled you above the knee, intervening; and bogged

blue-bloused dray-drivers sitting here and there on the tops of their

loads of wool-bales, smoking in sullen resignation, like mariners in the

tops of gradually-sinking wrecks.

At last, however, our pioneers came to the end of even such roads as

these, and had to trust to rare cattle-paths, the sun, the compass, and

"gumption" for guidance. They had reached the march-land on which the

white man, who has grown nearly as wild, meets the black man who has not

been tamed, and shoots him or poisons him with strychnine-damper for

spearing his flocks and herds, and sometimes gets speared by him in

return. On the last run our pioneers crossed they met a stockman who was

herding cattle with pistols in his holsters and a carbine in his hand. A

strange wild-looking fellow was this stockman. He wore a rain-blackened,

sun-bronzed, cabbage-tree hat, with a jetty, greasy cutty pipe stuck

into the discoloured band; a faded, stained, white-seamed red shirt,

buckled round him with a chapped brown belt; and tattered moleskin

trousers falling in vandyked fringes over rusty gaping boots. One of his

stirrup-leathers was made of knotted green hide. His face was just the

colour of his hat--the little of it that could be seen peeping through a

foot or two of coarse black hair like a guardsman's bearskin. He had

lived so long by himself that, when he first began to talk to the

new-comers, he stammered like a bashful girl. He soon recovered his

tongue, however, and the first thing he asked for was tobacco. They were

smoking tea on that station, owing to the long time the drays that were

bringing them fresh stores had been delayed upon the road. When Sydney

gave the man a fig or two of colonial tobacco, and another of glossy

Barrett's twist, he pounced upon them as if he could scarcely believe

his eyes. The American negrohead he put away jealously in his

trousers-pocket for special occasions, and then began to slice and rub

up the dull-green saltpetery colonial tobacco, as if he was famishing

for want of a "proper smoke." As it spluttered in his pipe he told the

strangers some strange tales about the blacks. They had sighted them

several times before this; but, as the blacks had always bounded off

like so many kangaroos as soon as they were sighted, our pioneers had

begun to think that they would not have much to fear from them.

"Don't you believe it," said the stockman. "They'll be on ye when you're

least lookin' for 'em, the sneaking divils!"

This is one of the stories he told about the blacks, and from it you

will see that white men can be quite as bloodthirsty in those wild

parts:

"When we come up here, two er the chaps that the cove hired was

brothers. I niver seen brothers so fond er each other as them two young

fellers was. Strappin' young fellers, though they was new to this kind

er work. They'd been knockin' about, an' was glad to git anythin' to do,

I guess. Wal, one day Tom--that was the youngest--was down by the creek

yonder, lookin' arter a duck, or summat er that. Me an' Fred--that was

the eldest--was up on the rise beyont, lookin' arter the bullocks. All

of a suddent we heerd a _cooey_.

"'That's Tom,' says Fred. I didn't want him to tell me. It worn't a bit

like a black feller's.

"'He's come to grief,' says I, for it sounded like that, an' down we

galloped to the creek full pelt. Jist as we got into the scrub we heard

another _cooey_, an' presently another, fainter an' fainter like. Wal,

we hunted about, an' onder a grass tree we found poor Tom with a spear

stickin' into him.

"'Mother--poor old gal!' he says, when we come up to him, an' Fred was

kneelin' by his side. I guess he was the old gal's pet, and Fred had

promised to look arter him when they come out, or summut er that. Anyhow

Fred looked like a very divil.

"'Which way?' says he, lookin' about an' cockin' his gun. 'Who was it,

Tom?' says he, with his face as white as ashes.

"Poor Tom had jist breath enough left to say 'Black Swan,' an' then the

blood bubbled out er his mouth, an' he was dead, an' his brother

a-blubberin' over him like a gal over her sweetheart. I let him blubber

for a bit to ease hisself, but he was ser long about it that I gives him

a nudge with my foot. 'Come,' says I, 'Fred, git up--that ain't no

good,' says I.

"'No,' says he, jumpin' up, 'that _ain't_ no good--but you hear me,

Tom!' An' then he clinched his fist like the playactors, an' swore that,

if he iver cotched Black Swan, he'd cut him in two with a cross-cut saw.

"'Sarve him right,' says I, 'but there ain't much chance er that.'

"Black Swan was a black divil we'd called so 'cos of his gallus long

neck. Wal, we cotched Tom's horse, and Fred took the corpse back on it

to the station, and buried his brother close ahind our hut. I can't say

I relished that azactly, nor the way Fred 'ud go an' sit by the grave

arter sundown, mumblin' to hisself as if he was silly. He'd been a jolly

chap afore that--not half as jolly as Tom, though. The hut was like a

dead place when _he_ was gone. All that Fred seemed to care about was to

get a pop at the blacks. Wal, one day when we'd had a scrimmage with

'em, Fred hit Black Swan in the knee. He was a-hoppin' off, boohooin'

like a babby, a one leg, but Fred was down on him in no time. I 'spected

he'd blow his brains out right off, an' have done wi' him. But Fred

knocked him down with the butt-end er his gun, an' tied his hands an'

feet, an' lugged him back to our hut, an' kicked him into the skillion

ahind.

"'What are you going to do with that poor divil, Fred?' says I, when we

was havin' our smoke arter supper.

"'Niver _you_ mind,' says he.

"Wal, it worn't no business o' mine, an' so I turned in. Next mornin'

the black was gone, an' Fred didn't show. Then I guessed what was up,

an' told the cove. Him and me rode down to the place where poor Tom was

skewered, an' there, right afore the grass tree, was the black, lashed

atween two planks, an' sliced through as neat as you'd cut a sangwidch.

Fred niver showed arter that, an' I worn't sorry to be rid er his

company, though, arter all, it were on'y a black feller."

Prince Chummy was far less affected by this horrid story than Harry and

Donald were. There is not much love lost between black fellows of

different tribes; the tribes are not united by any feeling of common

patriotism; but native Australian lads have the same kind of liking for

the blacks that a young squire has for his peasant foster-brother.

"The cowardly English cur!" cried Harry, indignantly. "If they'd fought

fair with spears and womeras, the Englishman would precious soon have

cut his lucky."

But before he left his brother's station, Harry had learnt to think

somewhat more harshly of the blacks.

When Sydney's party had left that last run, and crossed a wide stretch

of dry scrub country, they struck a creek shaded by red gum-trees, and

ran it down until they came to what was, for Australia, a fine river.

Fig trees and pines--all kinds of trees--laced together with creepers

and wild vine, grew thick along the river's banks. They were pink and

purple and crimson and yellow with wild flowers, and big white

water-lilies with huge green leaves almost paved the water inshore.

There were wild fowl, too, in the river; and scores upon scores of

pigeons, bronzewings, and green and purple wompoos, were feasting on the

wild figs and cherries, and making them patter down like rain. Besides a

host of little birds, there were snowy cockatoos and flashing parrots

and lories galore, and sometimes a paddymelon was seen.

"Just won't we blaze away, Donald!" cried Harry, in ecstasy.

But what pleased Sydney more was the grassy, light-timbered land, that

stretched like a wild park for miles on both sides of the river. He

determined to seek no farther, and as soon as he had pitched his camp,

he was in the saddle again, and off to mark out his run. He scored the

bark of a tree from which he started with his initials, and then rode a

dozen miles or more, and slashed another tree with his tomahawk. In that

free-and-easy fashion he took possession of all the land between the

trees for ten miles on both sides of the river. Then he galloped into

camp again, and scribbled off a rough description of the district he had

taken up for the Crown Lands Office, using the dray for his

writing-desk. With this specification Prince Chummy was sent back upon

their tracks to the nearest post-office. It was by no means certain that

Prince Chummy would return, although he did seem so fond of his young

master, since black fellows are very fickle; but he could best be spared

from the station when hard work had to be done--that being an occupation

not at all to a black fellow's taste. He might safely be trusted to post

the letter, since Sydney had made him believe that it would come back to

tell of him if he didn't.

Whilst he was away Sydney and Jim and Bob set to work at timber-felling

and splitting, whilst Harry and Donald in turns mounted guard over the

stores or looked after the cattle. Before Prince Chummy got back, a

store had been run up, and a hut for Sydney and the boys, and another

for the men, and the stockyard was nearly finished. Masters and men

fared very much alike. In neither hut was there any superfluous

furniture. The bedsteads were bullocks' hides stretched on posts driven

into the ground. All this time not a black had been seen at Pigeon Park,

as Sydney had christened his station. They came often enough afterwards,

as you will read in my next chapter; but in this I have only room to

tell how they first made their appearance there.

One evening the cattle and horses had been driven into a grassy

horseshoe peninsula made by the winding river, not far from the huts.

Sydney and the men had knocked off work, and were sitting, smoking, on

their verandahs, and the boys were out with their guns. Presently Harry

cried out,

"Hark! I can hear a horse galloping yonder. Perhaps it's Chummy come

back. Let's go and meet him."

When Donald put his ear down to the ground, he heard the hoofs quite

plainly, and agreed to go. As a rule, young Australians think it is

necessary to ride when they set out anywhither of set purpose. They will

take the trouble of running a horse up from a flat almost a mile off in

order to ride a mile. But if the boys had gone back then for their

horses, the chances were that the horseman, whoever it was, would get to

the station almost as soon as they did; so they trotted off on foot. In

a few minutes the rider topped a rise, and though the setting sunlight

bathed him in bright blood, they could make out that it was Chummy. He

reined in as he drew near the boys in a place in which there was a belt

of scrub on both sides. He was grinning, and shouting back greetings to

his young friends, when from the scrub on both sides whizzed a flight of

spears. Poor Chummy, bristled like a porcupine, fell forward on his

horse's neck, clutching the mane with the rigid grasp of death, and the

fear-maddened horse, which had been wounded in the neck itself, rushed

past the boys like a whirlwind. Out of the scrub darted a score or two

of darkies, dancing and jabbering, "Wah! wah! wah!" like angry apes, and

advancing on the boys with brandished spears and wildly-waved boomerangs

and waddies.

"I did feel funky then, and no mistake, Mr. Howe," Harry afterwards told

me; "but, you see, if we'd shown the white feather then, it would have

been all up with us. So we turned round and stared at the blacks.

"'We must pepper them,' I said to Donald.

"'Ay, lad; but ane at a time, and then load whilst the ither is firin','

says Donald.

"He's a cool customer, is Donald, with his _t'anes_ and _t'ithers_. We

hadn't much time to talk, for I saw one of the beggars just going to let

drive at us, so I up with my gun and let drive at him. I was loaded with

duck-shot, and though it scattered, I must have spoilt his beauty, for

the blood came streaming down his face. It was queer to see how scared

the big beggars were--over six foot some of 'em were. They couldn't have

been much used to powder. They all of them stopped short when they saw

the blood, as if they'd _all_ been shot.

"'Don't wait for me,' I said to Donald, when I was going to load again;

but, though he gave 'em both his barrels pretty quick when he saw how

things were, he only marked 'em behind. They'd all turned, and before

you could say 'Jack Robinson' they'd vanished in the scrub. Syd and the

men weren't long in rushing up, I promise you; but there was nothing

left for them to do. Poor old Chummy was as dead as a doornail by that

time. We buried him before we went to bed, with some of the spear-heads

still sticking in him. We couldn't have got 'em out without tearing him

all to bits. I suppose the beggars had got it into their heads that he'd

brought us, and so wanted to finish him off first. It's strange the down

black fellows have on black fellows. Poor old Chummy! And yet, after

all, if you think of it, you can't blame the beggars. I can't see what

right we whites have to this country. If you were to get up at night and

see a fellow helping himself to your swag, you'd do your best, I guess,

to shoot him if he wouldn't bundle out. And that's how the blacks must

feel when they see us taking up their country. It sounds soft, and yet I

can't help half wishing sometimes that they were as 'cute and as plucky

as the Maories. _They_ won't stand nonsense, for all your English

red-coats; though the soldiers and settlers between them might eat up

every Maori, if they could only catch 'em and kill 'em. There's enough

of 'em to do it."

XI.

PIGEON PARK.

After that first brush, the blacks still for a time kept clear of the

station buildings, but, now here, now there, they were always giving

unpleasant proofs of their presence on the run. It was, in fact, the

best bit of their hunting-ground, and therefore it is not astonishing

that they considered the whites, instead of themselves, to be the

trespassers. The black fellows speared the cattle and horses, and tried

hard to kill the men and boys too. They had to look about them "with all

their eyes" when they were riding past any cover.

Once Handsome Bob was missing for a couple of days. When he was found he

was almost dead; for the blacks had knocked him off his horse with a

boomerang, gashed him with their tomahawks, prodded at him with their

spears till his flesh was like a perforated card, and then tied him to a

tree which ants had connected with their hill by a little sunken path

like a miniature railway-cutting. The ants and the flies had made an

awful object of poor Bob's patchwork of wounds; and though he did at

last most marvellously "recover," as it is called, he was half silly

ever afterwards. Jawing Jim was kinder to him than you would have

expected whilst he lay helpless in the hut, and Sydney and the boys, of

course, looked in, and did what they could for him. But for hours he had

to be left alone, with the chance that the blacks would swoop down upon

him and finish their work. When he did get about again, although half

silly in other things, he had a strange, fierce knack of surprising

black fellows, and potting them from behind a tree as if they had been

so many wild ducks.

Long before Handsome Bob was up again, his mates had been forced, as

they thought, to be almost equally savage. Whenever they saw a black,

they tried to kill him, as "naturally" as one tries to kill a snake or a

wasp or any vermin. It is not pleasant to have to write about such

things, but I must if I am to tell the whole truth about Australia.

Sydney soon got quite envenomed against the blacks, whom he had robbed

of their hunting-ground, because they were killing off his cattle; and

not long afterwards Harry and Donald fully sympathized with him. Not one

of the three felt the slightest scruple in shooting down a black, and

then cutting off his head and hanging it _in terrorem_ on a tree, as a

gamekeeper nails a hawk against his gable. There is a terrible amount of

the tiger in human nature. When blood has once been tasted, so to speak,

in savage earnest, "civilization" peels off like nose-skin in the

tropics, and "Christian" men, and even boys, are ready--eager--to shed

blood like water. They are _not_ eager to talk about what they have done

when they get back from the Bush amongst their mothers, sisters, wives,

and sweethearts; but then, they think white mothers, &c., are so

different from black gins and their offspring--and when the white women

hear of what the black fellows have done or tried to do to their

darlings, they are very apt to frame excuses for the white atrocities

which they dimly guess at when they kneel beside their beds at night to

give God thanks for their darlings' return to districts in which it is

possible to go to a "real church" and "regular services" every Sunday.

Jawing Jim wanted to "polish the blacks off" like dingoes, by setting

baits of poisoned food about the run; but at poison Sydney drew the

line, and the boys, who were half startled by the kindliness with which

they had taken to their killing work, could not help feeling relieved at

finding that the line was to be drawn anywhere.

"No, Jim," said Sydney. "Fighting's all fair. If we didn't shoot down

the blacks when we came across 'em, they'd precious soon spear us. But

it's sneaking to poison the beggars, when they haven't a chance of

hitting back."

"Boot ye poiason the warrigals, Mester Sydney, an' ah kent see as

there's mooch to choose atween the two soarts o' warmin."

"P'r'aps there isn't," answered Sydney. "But anyhow there's something of

a man, so far as look goes, in a black fellow; and so we'll fight fair.

I'll have no strychnine used--do you understand, Jim?"

"_Ah_ oonerstaun'," growled Jim, "boot _thee_ doosn't. Pooder or

poiason--wha-at's the oadds?"

After a good many brushes in the scrub, the black fellows grew more used

to fire-arms, and ventured down one night upon the station buildings.

Fortunately it was moonlight, and Donald, who chanced to be awake and

looking out of the window, could plainly distinguish the invaders as

they crept out of a patch of scrub about a couple of hundred yards off,

and came crouching towards the huts with their noses almost touching the

moonlit grass.

"Sydney! Harry!" he shouted, "here come the blacks!" and snatching up

his gun, he deliberately levelled it, and let fly at the foremost black

fellow.

When the blacks found that they were discovered, they sprang up erect,

streaked and spotted with white and red clay, daubed on in stripes, and

hideous faces, brandishing their spears, waving about their boomerangs

and waddies, knocking their bark shields together, and advancing rapidly

in a wild tramping dance to a horrible chorus of "Wah! wah! wah!"

But Donald's shot had aroused all the white folk. Handsome Bob was

strong enough to fire a gun then, and rushing to _his_ window, he was

the first to follow suit to Donald. Five marksmen were soon popping away

incessantly. A shower of missiles whizzed through the moonlit air, and

hurtled against the slab sides and bark roofs of the huts; but several

of the blacks were down on the ground, and more had been slightly hit.

Leaving their dead and badly wounded, the blacks turned and fled in

disorder, and the five whites, who had defeated more than a hundred

savages, sallied from their cover flushed with victory, and commenced an

incautious pursuit. In their contempt for their enemy, they straggled

from one another, and whilst they were thus giving chase, a tall black

suddenly sprang from behind a tree, stunned Harry with a blow of his

waddy, and carried him off.

When Harry came to himself, he was lying in a black fellows' encampment.

It was broad daylight. The wounded warriors were crouching here and

there, with earth instead of ointment stuffed into their wounds. The

unhurt warriors, for the twentieth time, were bragging about their

prowess. The gins had already celebrated it in a song, which they sang

as they dragged a water-hole for fish, with a mat rather than net of

twisted grass, and as they squatted on the ground inside and outside the

gunyahs--conical huts of bark and wild vine--that were scattered about

and clustered together under the weeping acacias. Grey, glistening bark

canoes were lazily rubbing their sides together on a large lagoon hard

by. "Tamed" dingoes slouched at their masters' heels, or snuffed about

the gunyahs, gaunt as starved wolves. One woman was suckling alternately

her own piccaninny and a puppy dingo! Two or three of the gins were

guarding some opossums that were being cooked under a round layer of

stones, on the top of which the kitchen fire was kindled. (Sometimes,

instead of using this oven arrangement, the blacks bury their game,

unskinned, in the hot ashes). The men had nothing on but a strip of

kangaroo-skin round their loins, but the women wore kangaroo and 'possum

rugs.

When Harry came to himself, he ached all over, and felt so stiff, that,

although he was not bound, he could not rise from the ground. He fell

sometimes on his face, and sometimes on his back, when he attempted to

get on his feet. Some black boys who were standing near jeered at him

when they saw this, and pricked him with their spears, at the same time

mimicking his motions, like so many monkeys. But an old black, who was

sitting with his back to the tree under which Harry was lying, left off

nursing his knees for a minute, waved the young rascals off, and

beckoned to a party of old gins to come near. These old ladies felt

Harry all over, and when they found that no bones were broken, they took

off his clothes, and began to dig their skinny black fists into him as

if they were kneading bread. Then they dipped him in a water-hole, and,

after he had lain down to dry, they trotted him about till all his aches

and pains were gone, and he was able to eat a hunch of baked 'possum

with relish--strong as it did taste of peppermint--even though he could

not help seeing that he was being attended to in this careful way simply

that he might give his captors more sport afterwards, when they began to

torture him. But one of the old women who had kneaded Harry had noticed

a mole on his back which was very much like one that a dead son of hers

had on _his_ back, and so the old woman had come to the conclusion that

her dead son had "jumped up white-fellow," as the blacks phrase it, in

Harry. The other members of the tribe opposed this view, and there was a

hot argument about it, in which, although it lasted for an hour, the

name of the dead son was not once mentioned--the Australian blacks

carefully abstaining from _naming_ their dead. At the end of this

controversy Harry was placed on a little mound, and a shield was given

him; three of the adroitest spear-throwers being stationed at some

distance opposite to him. The first threw, aiming at Harry's stomach,

but Harry, more by good luck than good management, caught the spear in

the shield.

"It is the son of Kaludie," shouted the old gin who claimed him as her

son.

"Kaludie is blind," shouted the others: "the son of Kaludie, when he

played with the spears, waved like the wild vine; the white boy stands

stiff as the tea-pole."

The second thrower hurled his spear, and that, too, quivered in the

shield, instead of piercing the heart at which it had been hurled.

"It is the son of Kaludie," shouted the old gin again.

Harry's marvellous luck still continued. He caught the third spear also,

which was aimed at his head.

"It is the son of Kaludie," for the third time shouted the old gin,

running to throw her arms around Harry, and at the same time gashing her

cheeks with a stone.

"Kaludie has eyes," shouted the others, at last convinced. "The white

fellow is slow as a koala, but this white boy is quick as a wink."

After this, although he was strictly watched, a great deal was made of

Harry. He was taken hunting and fishing with the tribe, and was helped

more plentifully than the other boys to the wallaby, snake, parrot,

iguana, yam, figs, honey, grubs, or whatever else happened to be going

for food. This made the black lads jealous of him, and one of them

asked, "Was not the son of Kaludie a kipper?" and then pointed to

Harry's mouth, out of which, of course, no tooth had been knocked,

black-fellow fashion, at the "kipper" age. This discovery brought on

another long argument, and it was at last decided that the son of

Kaludie must be made a kipper over again next full moon. Accordingly

poor Harry was obliged to submit to have a front tooth knocked out. That

was rather unpleasant; but if Donald had been with him, he would have

enjoyed the hunting and fishing. He learnt to hurl the spear and fling

the boomerang almost like a black fellow. But just as he was getting a

little reconciled to his captivity in the open air, something occurred

which made him long more than ever to get back to his own people. In a

fight with another tribe, several of his captors were slain. The corpses

were brought back and roasted, peeled like potatoes, and eaten by their

own comrades. When the bones had been picked, they were put into baskets

of native grass, sent about to be howled over, then brought back to

their families' gunyahs to be kept for a time _in memoriam_, and at last

hung on the branches or dropped into the hollows of trees, on which the

emblem of the tribe, a waratah, was carved. A plump arm was thrust into

Harry's hands, as a special treat. When he flung it down, and rushed

away from the horrid banquet, even Kaludie became half sceptical as to

whether he could indeed be her son. For days afterwards he could not

touch flesh food of any kind, and the natives' suspicions might have

been seriously aroused, had not their attention been diverted from him

by a mysterious illness which struck down young and old in their camp.

In vain were dead men's skins brought out for the invalids to be laid

on. In vain did adventurous warriors waylay the members of other tribes,

in order to secure their kidneys to make ointment for the sufferers. In

vain did the old gins rinse their mouths and spit beside the sick,

invoking curses on the sorcerer who had caused them to writhe in agony.

It was manifest, the blacks said, that the sorcerer came and went as he

pleased, underground, to the camp, and that he must be slain before its

peace could be restored. Handsome Bob was the sorcerer credited with its

calamity.

One day a boasting young black bounded into the camp, and, striking an

attitude, began to chant (of course in black fellow's lingo):

"I have slain--whom have I slain? Is it the white wizard that burrowed

like the wombat? Is it he whom we caught and fastened to the tree? Is it

the white wizard with the face like the flying fox? Yes, it is the white

wizard that lies slain under the wattle--slain by the spear of me, the

brave Jooragong."