“And yet,” he adds to himself, “it’s risky not to get the job done, for if that blank, blank Englishman got scent of what I’m really after in pushing up here, he’d try his best to let the black devils escape. We’ll go back,” he adds aloud, with a curse, “to the old-man sand-hills by the clay-pan, where I sent Jackie back with the pack-horses. It won’t do to stop here, or the black devils, curse ’em, will drop on us, you bet. So we’ll retire and doss down for a couple of hours’ camp—say till one o’clock. Take us an hour to reach the beggars; half-past two’s the time to catch ’em sleeping.”
Turning to one of his boys, he asks,—
“How many black beggars sit down alonger camp, Bingerie?”
Bingerie, who has been close to the village that our readers have just left, and on business not altogether unconnected, as country newspapers would say, with the proposed slaughter of its inhabitants, murmurs huskily in reply,—
“Mine bin think him plenty black fellow sit down longer camp. Big fellow mob. Plenty little beggar, plenty pickaninnie all about gunyah.” The speaker’s black face wrinkles up into a cruel, Satan-like grin, as he touches the tomahawk in his belt, the two actions boding no good for the said pickaninnies if he gets them in his clutches. Then glancing with cunning, obsequious eyes at his master’s face, to try and catch through the darkness a facial expression of approval, he continues, “Mine see um plenty gin, plenty little beggar gin (little women, i.e., girls); mine catch um, by’m-bye.”
The white men laugh at this, and the “boss,” flinging a stick of “station-twist” to the black imp before them, gives him some directions.
“Well, Bingerie, you black devil, there’s some ’baccy for you. Now, you see that fellow star,” point-to that part of the heavens where the constellation of Orion’s belt was looking down from the calm Australian sky upon the group of explorers,—“you see one, two, three fellow star. All the same star longer brandy bottle.”
“Me know,” murmurs the black “boy,” with a smile of pleasant recollections crossing his attentive features for an instant.
“White fellow go alonger gunyahs, when three fellow star catch ’em that fellow branch. Big fellow hoot then, eh! you black limb of Satan, you!”
The black “boy”—all aboriginal male servants of Australians are called “boys,” regardless of the age to which they have attained—regards the overhanging branch, and, mentally gauging the time it will take for the stars indicated to reach it on their track westward ho! across the heavens, grunts “Me know,” and slinks off as noiselessly as a cat after sparrows, and presently reappears with another attendant sprite, both of them being mounted on wiry little horses, and leading the steeds of the rest of the party.