“What ’tation you belong to?” continues Yegerie, kicking the wounded man with the toe of his boot.
“Ah-r-r-r,” growls the wounded savage, with such angry fierceness that Inspector Puttis’s revolver drops into position, ready to give the sufferer his coup de grâce should he attempt any mischief.
“Monta karaan!” (curse you!) hisses the feeble voice, “you white devil. You kill um lubra (wife); you kill um pickaninnie; you,”—he pauses to gasp for breath,—“you kill um all about black fellow. No more brudder long a me. Ah! no more brudder long a me. Monta karaan!!” The sufferer’s head drops down towards the ground, and he literally bites the dust, or rather mud, in a frenzy of passion and agony. Then he becomes unconscious apparently, and murmurs a few unintelligible words, followed by a groaning request for—
“Kouta! kouta!” (Water, water.)
“Ah!” muses Puttis to himself, knowing by experience that a dying man speaks his last words in the language of his childhood, however much he may have forgotten it a little while before, when in full health. “Ah! Kouta is a western word. He’s a runaway nigger, and has been living with some tribe about here. He will be very well out of the way.” And nodding to his black aide-de-camp, who thereupon begins to drag the wounded savage off the track into the scrub, the inspector mounts and rides off.
As he reaches the other side of the dried-up river bed once more, his chestnut starts at the sound of a single carbine shot that rings out with weird, muffled suddenness from the dark glades he has just left. It is the requiem of another departed member of the fast-fading aboriginal race of Australia.
CHAPTER XII.
BILLY AND THE “HATTER.”
“He traced with dying hand ‘Remorse,’
And perished in the tracing.”