The host has by this time had six “nips” to his guest’s abstemious one, so turning his head towards Puttis he rattles on: “But won’t you alter your mind and have another? Or, if you prefer it, I’ve some real, genuine ‘potheen.’ Queensland make, of course, but just like the real stuff. One of my old constituents on the Barron river, ha! ha! sent it to me.” The two men smile and wink knowingly at each other. “Chinamen never forget a generous action, ha! ha!”
Laughing at the remembrance of how he obtained the “potheen,” and filling his glass from the decanter on the table with a very shaky hand, the jovial inspector continues,—
“In consequence of information received from one of my ‘boys,’ I rode up to the chinky’s little scrub farm one day, two years ago. ‘John,’ said I, ‘how many bushels of corn you get off this piece of ground?’ ‘Welly bad crop, Missie Bigger,’ answered the yellow devil, with a sly look at me to see how I took the lie he’d just uttered. ‘No goody Chinaman makey garden here. Twenty bushels me sell to Missie Brown. That all,’ and the cursed spawn of Confucius kicked some of the rich soil contemptuously over with his sandal. Any one could see there’d been a big crop, perhaps three hundred bushels off the land, by the heaps of husks off the heads of maize lying about the clearing. ‘Well, John,’ said I, leaning over in my saddle so that some friends who were with me shouldn’t hear, ‘well, John, you can send me a little of the ‘real stuff’ you sold MacDuff on Saturday, and then, whether you get twenty or five hundred bushels here, I sha’n’t trouble to ask you what you use it for next time.’ Ha! ha! how Li Ching (that was his name) stared! He grew green, but he never opened his lips. But what’s more to the purpose, he’s sent me a box of potatoes, regularly, every few months since, which I have carried carefully into my bedroom. I’m sure you’d like it. Take a bottle or two with you for Giles. He’s a good judge. What?”
“Thanks, awfully,” replies Inspector Puttis. “Do so with pleasure. But what’s your trouble? Little affair you mentioned?”
The jolly smile that has illuminated Inspector Bigger’s face during his telling of the previous anecdote fades suddenly upon the objectionable subject of the official inquiry being recalled to his memory. He hands the red-sealed epistle and the newspaper cutting to his friend with a sigh, and watches the expressionless face of the little man as he carefully reads both with anxiety.
“Well, Puttis, what had I better do about that?”
“About correct?” inquires the person addressed, pointing to the clipping in his hand.
“Oh, I think so. Of course I wasn’t there. No good my going up those beastly hills in the wet. You see, there’s not been much doing lately in our line about here, and the ‘boys’ were getting troublesome, so I told Blarney (the sergeant) to see if he couldn’t find something for them to do. He heard of niggers having been seen up Mulberry Creek way, and——”
“How did you word report?” interrupts Puttis, lighting a cigarette.
“Oh! same old style: ‘Having received repeated complaints from the Mulberry Scrub settlers of the wholesale destruction caused by a ferocious tribe of dangerous Myall blacks,’—and that kind of thing, you know.”