“Giles tried me with one thing and then another. Offered me anything I liked, at last, to take him to the grave. Thought I was only like a station black, I suppose!” and the speaker scrapes angrily at the wooden handle between his knees, with a black splinter of obsidian (volcanic glass) that he is using as a ready-made draw-knife.
“Then Giles has a talk with his niece,—she bosses it at ‘Government House’” (is mistress at the head-station),—“and she says ‘Flog the nigger! flog him!’ And a house-gin who belongs to my Mordu Kapara (class-family), which is Kalaru, hears all this as she sets cloth in the parlour. She come and tells me. Then me run away. Then me turn wild beggar again!”
Billy, who by this time is gesticulating excitedly with his hands, curiously relapses, slightly,—as he always does when highly agitated,—into the remarkable “station-jargon” to which we have already had occasion to refer.
“Me run and run. An’ Giles, he borrow the big dogs with the red eyes and thin flanks (bloodhounds) from Bulla Bulla station.”
“I know ’em,” interrupts old Weevil; “that fellow on the Mulgrave’s made a good thing out of breeding them for the squatters.”
“Well, boss, I made for the scrub. But I get tired, and the stinging-tree blind me, all but. The dogs come up close. I hear them howl, and the men calling to them. But the big dogs badly trained; they go after young cassowary, and I drown my tracks in a creek, and then ‘possum’ (hide in a tree) all the day.”
After Billy has thus graphically given his account of his marvellous escape from the clutches of Mr. Giles, the conversation turns upon the subject of going down the creek to the nearest township, which we will christen Meesonton, after a well-known Australian explorer living in the district.
“We’ll both go as far as the low scrub range, over the Beatrice creek,” observes old Weevil, “and yer can work the old sluice there I was telling yer of yesterday if them cursed Chinkies ain’t found it. I won’t be more nor a week or so away. I wouldn’t advise yer,” continues the old man, “ter show yer face near the store yet awhile. That beggar Giles is well in with the perlice, and they’d knab yer like enough.”
So very early next morning Billy and the old miner set out; just about the time when that earliest of early birds, the crow, has begun to think it time to commence his matutinal robberies, and long ere the sun has risen to dry the fern and scrub sufficiently for any natives to be out hunting who might notice the two men’s departure. By midday our friends have followed for eight miles that only road possible through the dense jungle,—the rough, white bed of the merry little creek. Here, after a rest and a smoke, the men left the stream and clambered up the dark, clayey banks, when they found themselves on a broken, open piece of country, across which they steered, Weevil leading, in a north-easterly direction, passing numerous little trickling creeks trending eastwards on their way. Here and there the recent footprints of aborigines were to be seen in the rich, volcanic soil; and once Billy detected the voices of natives, but said nothing to his companion about it. Late in the afternoon, after crossing some level tablelands, thinly covered with scrub, several large gunyahs (native dwellings) were discovered, and, as the evening began to look stormy, the two men took possession of one of the largest of them. These huts were similar to beehives in shape, like those of the village on the Paree river that we described in Chapter VIII., and were substantially thatched with fern fronds and that coarse kind of grass that grows in the open spaces in the scrub called “pockets” by northern bushmen. These “pockets” are treeless spots circular in form, and generally half an acre in extent, and are used by the aborigines for boorers (native tournaments) and dances. One of these native Champs de Mars, on the upper Barron river, covers quite fifteen acres, and is also a perfect circle.
It was still dark, the next morning, when Billy and old Weevil started once more on their journey; and the latter, in consequence, fell into a two-foot hole near the gunyah in which they had slept, and found himself lying on a mass of loose, rattling objects, which his sense of touch quickly told him were human skulls,—the remains, doubtless, of by-gone picnics of the good people whose village the two men had appropriated during the previous night.