The other men smile knowingly at each other, as if they had expected him to vacate his seat before long, and one explains, “That’s the cats’ seat; there ar’n’t any over here.”
“Talking of cats,” observes the station storekeeper, who, being the distant relative of an Irish baronet, is considered a person of some importance in the district, “it wouldn’t be a bad ideah, bai Joave, to twain some of Bwowne’s cweatures for the hill-country, where the dawgs cawn’t work properly. How did you manage to get along yesterday, Mr. Morth?” The last sentence is addressed to the young sub-inspector.
“Oh, not so badly,” replies the police officer, as he knocks his cigar end off upon the leg of his rather rickety chair. Mr. Morth is a youngish man, slim and active as a greyhound, who glories in his work from a sportsman’s point of view. “Oh, we didn’t do so badly. We got another lot besides the party your boys put us on to. But that broken country at the back of the Black Rock is the very devil. Fifteen miles, sir, we had to track the beggars after we left our horses, and then they’d have got away if there hadn’t been old people with them.”
“You lost a boy, didn’t you?”
“Yes, worse luck. Poor old Jet lost the number of his mess. We got the beggars against a cliff, and when they found they were in a trap they rushed at the boys. I never saw a nigger harder to kill than the rascal that knocked Jet on the head. I put six bullets into the beggar before I dropped him.”
“Niggers bad up my way?” asks the new manager of Hanga Station.
“That’s not in my patrol, so can’t say,” replies the sub-inspector.
“I think you will have a deuce of a lot of trouble up there,” observes the storekeeper. “Your predecessah allowed the beggars to wandah all ovah the wun. Spoilt them all togethah. Weally one could not go neah a water-hole without seeing some of the black devils camped there. They came in from all the other stations wound.”
“Oh, I’ll soon alter all that,” remarks the Hanga manager with an oath.
“Milby was the boy with niggers,” says a dark-eyed man at the other end of the little table, as he glances up from the American cloth cover before him, upon which he has been amusing himself by imprisoning sundry stray ants in a complicated maze, traced with the wet bottom of his tumbler. “Did you ever meet him, Lawrence?”