“Now don’t fall out, you two boys,” roars a big, burly, perspiring, jolly-faced, elderly man, who is sitting by the open window, “it’s much too hot to quarrel. Morton’s only trying to get a rise out of you. All new-comers here talk like you do at first. Now as I’m a little bit older than you are, Mr. Jolly, I’ll just give you a friendly bit of advice. Don’t take offence, if I say you are airing your opinions in an incautious manner. You ought to allow that we ‘old chums’ know more about the way to treat the niggers than you can. You raise,” continued the speaker, who is the pushing proprietor-editor of the new-born local gazette, ladling an ant out of his glass of lager-beer, “you raise the old indictment of wholesale slaughter of the black population by the white Christians who have seized upon their lands. It is the ancient story of midnight murder, treachery, bloodshed, hypocrisy, cruelty, and immorality, which has been told in every land where the Englishman——”
“I deny that,” interrupts Mr. Jolly.
“Well, to please you,—the, er, European has come in contact with and dispossessed a feeble population. The men by whom these outrages,—confound the brute! (this to a gecke, or climbing lizard, that has fallen off the ceiling on to the speaker’s pate),—the men by whom these outrages are perpetrated are members of that race which, with all respect for Mr. Jolly’s favourable and patriotic opinions of his countrymen, claims to be the protector of the oppressed all the world over; and the tale of their atrocities is identical with the tales which—when the scene was laid in Bulgaria instead of Australia—roused the whole Anglo-Saxon race to an outburst of virtuous wrath and holy reproach. It is a story, on a smaller scale,” continued the speaker, taking a fresh cigar from a box near him and lighting it, “on a smaller scale, of India over again.”
“No!” jerks out the dark-coated youth.
“But it is,” snaps Mr. Editor-Proprietor. “The tragedy which the British alleged Christian enacted in Jamaica, Burmah, Egypt, and a hundred other scenes of massacre, and which the same snuffling Christian will continue to enact so long as he is strong enough to kill, and some one else is weak enough to be killed——”
Here the speaker paused, and, taking a glass of lager at a gulp, spat out of the window, and looked round, cigar in mouth, at the young man who had been the cause of his lengthy speech.
“Well, you surprise me, Mr. Brown,” says the latter, in answer to that gentleman’s stare, “and that’s all I’ll say further. I was prepared to find some excuses presented for such atrocities, as, for example, hot-blood, revenge, etc., but not on the lines you have laid down. You will excuse me if I take your remarks to mean that you are expressing your constituents’ opinions, not your own, when you say that no man would attempt to protect the helpless, unless he had selfish motives in view, or was a fool.”
Swinging round on her chair at the piano, the pretty, little, fragile hostess, who is a young woman of twenty, but who looks at least twenty-five years old, eyes the debaters with an amused and rather satirical face.
“Well,” she says, interrupting the somewhat heated conversation, making a pretty little moue, “what’s the good of talking about those horrid blacks? Augh! I hate them. And I ought to know, for I’m a squatter’s daughter; and my father had to shoot more niggers when he first took up the Whangaborra country than any man in Queensland has.”
The young black-coated philaboriginist turns his head, and looks with mute wonder at the fair young advocate of human slaughter.