"What the deuce am I to do now?" groaned the victim, gently chafing his bruises.
He was answered by a shrill scream, an energetic and most piercing feminine yell of terror, and lifting his startled eyes he beheld a young girl, clad after the manner of a settler's daughter, standing a few yards away, staring at him with wild horrified eyes. The girl's fingers were clutching her hair, her face was white, her limbs convulsed, she seemed glued to the spot, incapable of movement, but power of screaming remained with her, and she exerted it to the utmost—she screamed, and screamed, and screamed again, the bush resounded with the echoes of her agonised cries.
For a moment Nickie stared back in blank surprise. It had not struck him that he was the occasion of this frantic demonstration, but presently he realised that a little screaming was excusable in an excitable young lady coming suddenly upon a full-grown missing link drowsing under the gums in her native bush.
Nickie arose, he advanced a step. His intentions were honourable he meant to offer a full explanation, with apologies, but the girl did not wait; at his first movement she swung round and fled through the trees, still screaming.
The Missing Link sat down again with a sigh. Anyhow there must be a residence near, he was not destined to perish in the bush; but the girl would rush home with a shocking tale of some hideous monster in the paddock, her male relations would come to hunt down that monster. Nickie had had experience of such hunters; he remembered that they carried guns, and that they were not disposed to delay shooting in order to argue with a monkey about the sacredness of life.
Mr. Crips had a ready mind, and his peculiar career had taught him the necessity of prompt action. With eager hands he pulled off his monkey skin, rolled it up, and stuffed it into a hollow log, with the head-piece and mask; and then with his singlet he rubbed the make-up off his face, rubbing off a fair amount of hide in his eagerness. After this he set to work tearing up the grass tufts, and creating evidence of a struggle. The blood from a cut in his head came in most useful; he made as big a show as possible with it. Nicholas Crips next lay down amid the ruin he had wrought.
Nickie had not long to wait. About twenty minutes later he saw an elderly man and a youth coming hurriedly through the trees, looking about them eagerly. Each carried a gun. He sat up and beckoned, and they hastened to him, not a little astonished to find a strange man clad only in torn singlet and drawers lying there in the depths of the bush.
"Hullo, mate," said the elder man, "what's amiss?"
Nickie groaned aloud. "Horrible!" he gasped. "Horrible! Horrible!"
The man raised him. "I say, you've been knocked about," he said. "Have you seen anythin'?"