“Will you first let me bring up two of the blacks who have befriended us all these years?”
“Yes, if they are unarmed, and their tribe does not come with them.”
Mat gave a reassuring answer, and then went back for the chief and his wife, whom he shortly returned with, introducing his brother at the same time.
Our foresters were soon comfortably seated at the fire, revelling in the long-forgotten luxuries of tea, sugar, and tobacco, their hearts too full to speak, and, as Tim observed, “he did not know how to think even, it was so like a dream.” Our heroes, in fact, felt prostrated with joy. They wished, in this supreme first hour of real liberty, to hear no news, to ask no questions; which their new acquaintances observing, simply put another “billy” of tea on the fire, and very thoughtfully left them to meditate undisturbed.
The evening had closed in, when two black boys belonging to the camp came up.
Dromoora could not make out these “boys” at all, dressed, as they were, in gaudy-coloured flannel shirts and moleskins. He hailed them in every dialect he knew, but all to no purpose; they only stared at him, and more still did they stare at the brothers, whom, however, they told their masters at once “were white fellow, only all the same black fellow.”
The strangers, seeing that Tim suffered from rheumatism, had thoughtfully rigged him up a kind of tent, or “lean to,” of canvas, in a sheltered spot at the back of the camp, his two native friends sleeping in the same part, and carrying on their own and Tim’s cooking there.
Mat stayed with his hosts, and slept by their open fire.
Before going to sleep this first night, one of them said to him, “Now that you have collected your thoughts a bit, tell me more about yourselves, and we’ll let you know what we are doing up here. By the way, if you had not dropped across us, you would have wandered a lot further before finding anything like a station.”
However, Mat had not much more to tell, for the brothers had agreed, on first discovering the strangers, that, though they would of course relate their adventures in a general way, yet that many particulars and incidents of their past lives they would withhold until they knew more of their new comrades.