In the Musgrave Ranges

by Conrad H. Sayce

Yarloo pulled it out and looked at it. The shaft, which had broken off about a foot from the end was made of lance-wood. The head of the spear was broad and flat, and was made of red mulga, a hard, tough, poisonous wood. It was bound to the shaft with kangaroo sinews and spinifex gum in such a way that the black-boy had no hesitation in pointing to the mountain range to the left of them. "Musgrave black-fella," he said. "Me know um this one."

Stobart left the cattle which they had collected in charge of Yarloo and galloped ahead. He met other cattle, dead or dying, but was not prepared for what he saw when he topped the rise just above the water-hole where the camp had been.

A crowd of about fifty blacks squatted round a fire. Their naked bodies were smeared with red ochre and clay in fantastic designs, and many of them had feathers or grass or the claws of large birds in their bunched-up hair. Great bleeding chunks of meat and entrails were smoking and sizzling in the fire, and all around them were the carcasses of dead cattle. It seemed incredible that fifty men armed only with boomerangs and wooden spears should have been able to commit such a slaughter. The white man took all this in at a glance, and then his face hardened and he knew that he was nearer death than he had ever been before, for a little distance away were the bodies of six clothed black-boys and a white man, laid out in a row. The sun beat down pitilessly on that terrible scene, but not one of the seven put his hand up to drive away the flies or to protect his head from the glare. They were dead!

The feasting natives saw him at once and rose to their feet with a yell. Stobart did not ride away. Such an act of fear would have made his death sure, and probably more hideous than it would be if he faced those shouting, dancing, gesticulating fiends.

He took a fresh grip of the reins and urged his unwilling horse to go down the hill to meet the blacks. This act of courageous audacity checked them for a moment. They collected in a bunch and yabbered excitedly. Stobart understood several aboriginal languages, but this one was wild and harsh and quiet strange to him.

Sitting firmly but easily in the saddle, the white man rode quietly up to the savages. When he was only a horse's length away, he drew rein and looked at them. Several of the men stepped back, flung their spear-arms behind their heads, fastened the woomeras, and prepared to throw. But the long quivering shafts never left their hands. One or two jumped out from the crowd and swayed back their supple black bodies to give additional force to a boomerang. But the heavy curved weapon never started on its death-dealing course. Here and there a man sprang up in the air and waved his spears wildly over his head, and shouted words of hatred towards the white man and of encouragement to his companions. But the result of it all was nothing worse than threatening and noise.

Stobart sat and looked at them. He was a famous horse-breaker and a noted man with cattle, and had found, in dealing both with animals and with men, the power which his eye possessed. It was the focusing-point of all the force and personality of a remarkable man.

But who can quell and keep on quelling the passions of fifty savages who have tasted blood? One man broke the spell of the drover's steady glance. He jumped to one side and hurled a boomerang. Stobart dodged. It passed him and whizzed on, turning and turning for nearly two hundred yards, so great had been the force behind it. The man had put so much energy into the throw that his body was jerked forward till he was standing beside the horseman.

A great shout went up when the weapon left the hand of the black-fellow, but it was cut off suddenly to amazed silence when the boomerang passed on and left the white unharmed. This man must be a devil. At once every spear was raised, poised in the woomera, and directed, not at the white man, but at the native who had dared to pit his strength against a supernatural power. Stobart understood the situation immediately, and so did the unfortunate black, who hunched his shoulders ready for death.

Suddenly one of those reckless impulses came to the drover which come only to great men, and which are often the turning-points of their lives. He jabbed spurs into his horse's flanks and wheeled it like a flash between the cringing native and his would-be murderers. At the same time he raised his hand and shouted: