Meanwhile the whirling figures in the wood continued their mad career, and the flames from the great fire in their midst spouted high above the motionless mallee tips. The myriad stars twinkled merrily in an unclouded sky, and the Southern Cross constellation shone out brilliantly almost directly overhead. A slender crescent moon just above the horizon lent its feeble halo to the scene, so that a vague, eerie half light seemed to float on the surface of the land. Faster and still faster the maddened Wangul worshippers rushed, and the night was filled with their harsh, unmusical ravings.
Mackay watched the progress of events with quickening interest, while Emu Bill with many a muttered malediction examined the charges in his revolver, and smoked reflectively. Mackay was very unwilling to awake the sleepers unless it were absolutely necessary; they needed all the rest they could get. But Emu Bill recalled him to a sense of duty.
"I've been watching the circus," he said quietly, "an' I can see nary mourner in the crowd. For a dead cert they'll be comin' fur us when they've worked up enough enthusiasm. They'll imagine us to be asleep by now."
Mackay got up without a word, and shook Bob and Jack back to consciousness. Never Never Dave was alert on the instant, but the Shadow slumbered deeply and refused to be awakened, whereupon Emu Bill aroused him by rolling him rudely out of his blanket, a proceeding which almost created a civil war on the spot.
"You has no right to dislocate my sweet dreams in such a dingo fashion," the bellicose Shadow protested grumpily; but when he understood the seriousness of the position his wrath dissolved speedily. "At the same time I reckon you is a bit too much skeert about the antics o' them muskitties," he remarked chidingly. "I was having a daisy dream, I was; flooded rivers an' gold an' di'monds, an'——"
"Shut it off, Shad," unsympathetically interrupted the object of his disapproval. "They're on our track now. Look!"
The corroborree fire continued to blaze up vividly, and the watchers could see numerous naked savages piling on the logs and dancing amid the showering sparks like denizens of the nether world. The circling mass of grotesquely garbed warriors had broken up in apparent confusion, but quickly they again came into view and re-formed on the edge of the zone of illumination, then spreading fan-like to north and south, they came slowly yet steadily towards the supposed sleeping camp. A moment more and they were hidden from view in the intervening shadows.
"Things are beginning to look lively," said Bob, adjusting his cartridge-belt.
Jack ranged himself quietly by his comrade's side, his rifle gripped in readiness.
"I don't know how this is going to turn out, Bob," he said slowly; "but I mean to shoot straight, to-night."