“Nothing, save but that the artful police thereupon sent some of their ‘boys’ at night, who quietly burned the bodies to prevent identification. Next day the coroner arrives, all dhrookin wid heat, for he’d hurried a bit to oblige the J.P., who was a powerful man and commanded a lot of votes, and, moreover, was a ‘bit of a lad’ when vexed. Now my friend, the doctor that this tale’s about, was a young man, just commencing practice, at the time, in the next town, and he was sent as an independent man, and one who was family doctor of the gentleman who might get hanged over the matter, to see the bones and identify them as human. Before he left home, however, the Black Police officials ‘got at him.’ ‘You’re a young man in this same district,’ they said, ‘and you’re not the gentleman to be afther taking the part of the black divils against your old friends you’ve just come to live amongst, let alone the fact that you’re our district-surgeon, and the same for the City Police. And isn’t your bread and butter dependent on the squatters and settlers round, who call us to do their dirty work for them and clean off the natives? Divil a one of the same but would shut you out if you interfered wid one of us. So, doctor asthor,’ they said in conclusion, ‘see what you can do to help poor Dash out of the mess, for it’s yourself will be called as a truthful witness at the inquest.’
“Well, this young friend of mine went and pleaded that he could not tell if the bones were human remains or not, and the inquiry consequently dropped through.”
“And did the inspector get off scot-free?”
“Well, not quite; ‘though very like it,’ as Mr. Pecksniff used to say. The J.P., as I said, was an influential man, and did his best to get the murderers punished. The inspector got sacked till the elections were over, just to keep our J.P. and the newspaper folk quiet. The ‘black boys’ too were brought to trial, but were released on the ground that they could not understand English, although they’d been years in the force, and English was the only medium employed in their conversations with each other, and their instructions and commands were always given in that language.”
“Well, doctor, that incident rather reflects on the judges of the colony. But although I confess I can’t altogether believe that such cruelty and gross miscarriage of justice does often happen in Queensland, yet what you say just bears out what Williams, my mining friend, says.
“He was on the Palmer gold-field, before it was the Palmer, you know, and he tells me that the blacks were safe enough to travel amongst till the settlers began to drive them from their water-holes and steal their women. Why, two fellows and himself travelled from Rockhampton to where Cooktown is now without any trouble from the natives, three years before the Palmer broke out.”
“Yes, that’s thrue for ye, but the older school of diggers were a mighty different lot to the rough lads that followed them. Many’s the yarn I’ve had with the old boys in the accident ward, for it’s there they open their hearts, as well as their mouths, for their medical attendant to pry into. But the species is growing scarce, me bhoy, and one may ask wid the swate poet,—
“‘Why is this glorious creature found,
One only in ten thousand?’”
And here the doctor forsakes the light Irish tone he has hitherto assumed, which he calls his “visiting voice,” and calmly settles down to smoke a cigar and answers his old friend’s questions in a prosaic English conversation; honouring Claude, as he does but few, by throwing aside, for the nonce, those scintillating surroundings of synonyms that, like the gay flag at the live end of a lance, are generally employed by the doctor’s countrymen in shielding the true point of their remarks from view. He continues, after a thoughtful pause:—