The frugal repast is soon silently completed, but half a mile down the creek, where the aborigines have constructed an ingenious weir, armed with conical baskets in which to catch what fish may pass that way, Billy and his companion find a small army of copper-coloured natives collected on the opposite side of the stream, who wave and beckon to the two travellers to return whence they came. Their gesticulations and fierce yells not having the desired effect, a series of signals are given by them to other natives in ambush on the jungle-fringed precipices that rise with lycopodium-tasselled ledges above the heads of the intruders.
“We’re in fur it now!” grunts the older man, who has done some prospecting in New Guinea, amongst other places. “Them yellow niggers is Kalkadoones, and as like Papuans as may be; and they’re devils to fight. Keep close under the cliff.”
Billy guesses the mode of attack which the old digger’s experience teaches him to anticipate, and which prompts his advice to his mate to seek the shelter of the rocks as much as possible. The wiseness of this precaution is soon seen. For when our friends are fairly started on their way past the rapids in the gloomy gorge, the natives commence hurling down great boulders of conglomerate. These would speedily have crushed the adventurous twain below, had they not been sheltered by the overhanging base of the precipice, which was worn concave by the river’s action during floods. As it was many of the rocks bounded horribly close to the men’s heads.
“I can’t use my gun here, that’s sartin,” presently observes the old man, as he puts fresh caps upon his old companion of many years. “We’ll have to clear them beggars off before we go any further.” Then springing from his shelter with his rags and tangled grey locks flying in the air, Weevil makes for a rocky reef that juts out into the river, which is deep at this place, with the idea of peppering the enemy from this point of vantage.
But the Fates are against him, and sable Sister Atropos snaps her weird scissors on poor old Weevil’s thread of existence. A shower of stones descends upon the wild-looking figure as it hurries towards the river, and the old miner falls an uncouth, bleeding object upon the strand, groaning heavily.
Happily, the gun has escaped destruction, and by its aid Billy, who rushes forward to defend his friend, performs prodigies of valour that on a field of civilized warfare would certainly have gained him some such coveted distinction as the Victoria Cross.
A hurried shot at the yelling figures that are clinging to the trees overhanging the edge of the cliff in an appalling manner, and one of them comes spinning down with a sickening thud upon the rocks below. A second wire cartridge sent in the same direction is equally successful, and another of the enemy tumbles forward on to a jagged rock that projects from the precipice; while his friends, horrified at the sudden illness that has thus overtaken two of their number, stop short in the middle of a diabolical yell of triumph, and clearing off are seen no more.
Billy bathes the crushed features of the old man, whose stentorious breathing shows how badly he is injured, and the cold water revives him somewhat.
“I’m busted in my inside, lad,” he murmurs raspily. “Gimme me pipe. I can’t see to——How blind I’m gettin’!”
After a pause, during which he has tried to smoke in vain, he asks to be raised in a sitting posture.