Whilst Claude stands puzzling over the mystic meaning of the dark fair ones before him, Mr. Cummercropper enters the room, and nodding to our hero—and thereby losing his eyeglass for a few seconds—proceeds to tediously deliver the same message Angland has already received. Claude waits till the æsthetical station storekeeper has finished, and then begs him to enlighten him as to the meaning of the laughing girls.
“Ha! ha!” chuckles Mr. Cummercropper out of the depths of his high collar. “Bai Joave! not bad, by any means. They don’t want to know your name. Picked that much up long ago. ‘What name?’ means, in this part of the globe, ‘Which will you have, coffee, tea, or cocoa, for breakfast?’ Don’t it, Dina?”
Dina grins a comprehensive smile, and nods her brilliantly beturbaned head in reply to the query; and, obtaining a satisfactory answer at last to her oft-repeated question, trots her buxom little figure away into the kitchen. After breakfast Claude spends his morning in trying to learn something of Billy; but he is almost entirely unsuccessful, as the blacks about the station are strangely reticent. The disappearance of his late uncle’s servant is very annoying to Angland, and our young friend is really puzzled to know what steps he had better take next. Claude has a lonely lunch, for none of the station folk are yet returned, and Mr. Cummercropper has descended from the art student to the “rational” storekeeper, and has started off in a buggy and pair with a load of “rations” for a far-off out-station; and then, getting a “boy” to fetch his horse in from the paddock, he canters over to an out-station, where he left his miner friend and the two boys the night before.
“Well, lad, thou hast not been successful in thy work,” says old Williams, Claude’s digger companion as he observes that young man’s disappointed face. “And that I were right to camp here I’ll show ye. There’s nowt save ourselves here, for they’re out must’ring ‘weaners.’ So coome inside out of the sun, and I’ll tell thee news o’ Billy.”
Claude watches his lively purchase, Joe, hobble the horse, and then follows Williams into the two-roomed shanty, which is honoured by the name of an “out-station house.” It is merely a roughly-built hut, with walls of gum-tree slabs laid one upon another, and a roof formed of sheets of brown gum-tree bark. The studs of the building, also the rafters and purlieus, are ingeniously kept in position by neatly fastened strips of “green hide” (raw leather), and the hard grey floor and colossal chimney-place are composed of the remains of a number of ant-hills that have been pounded up for the purpose. The material of which these hills are built is a kind of papier mâché, consisting of wood-fibre and clay, and is in much request amongst northern settlers for various structural purposes. The termites, or “white ants,” sometimes raise their many-coned mounds to a height of from twelve to fifteen feet, and these “spires and steeples,” with the absence of dead tree-stems upon the ground,—another sign of the presence of these insects,—are two of the most characteristic features of the open bush country of Northern Queensland.
Williams squats down on his hams, bush-fashion, in front of the yawning fireplace, where a camp-oven, suspended over the grey embers, is frizzling forth the vapoury flavour of “salt-junk,” and after lighting his pipe proceeds to tell Claude what he has found out from the stockmen. This, to condense the lengthened yarn of the old miner, is just what Billy related of himself, in our presence, to the old “hatter” Weevil in the lonely jungle cave.
“He’ll coome back here, I tell ye. For note ye, lad, he camped as long as he could at Murdaro, till they made him clear.”
“Yes, I believe he was waiting there for me,” responds Claude.
“Now, mind ye,” continues the digger, gesticulating with his maize-cob pipe, “mind ye make every nigger round know that yer wants to find Billy, and ye’ll hear of him soon, like enough. Now the more ye gets known here the safer fur ye, so wait here till the men get back. Ye can pitch ’em a song after supper and ride home with the head stock-keeper. He’ll be going up to ‘Government House’ to-night. Moon rises ’bout nine.”
Half an hour before sundown a dust cloud that has been slowly travelling for the last two hours across the plain, in the direction of the out-station, reaches its destination. It is now seen to be caused by the feet of a small “mob” (herd) of cows and unbranded calves. These, after much yelling and an accompanying—