“Hau Hau” bang came all together, and the misguided fanatic, smote full in the chest by four sneider bullets, collapsed and fell on his face as dead as Julius Cæsar.
Now was that Hau Hau, blood-stained brute as he undoubtedly was, a martyr or only a bally fool? Remember, he had only a few hours previously escaped from out of a sharp fight in which many of his co-religionists had been killed, and after winning through to safety himself he is so strong in his faith that he voluntarily returns alone and unarmed to justify the truth of his conviction, although he well knows he is facing certain death providing he be wrong in his belief.
You may call him which or what you please, but I maintain that he is just as much to be enrolled in the army of martyrs as any of the poor devils who were stretched on red-hot gridirons, or were put to death in other unpleasant ways, for testifying to what they believed to be the truth.
CHAPTER V
A BRUSH WITH BUSHRANGERS
(Told by the Old Identity)
In Australia, during the early seventies, bushrangers were still to the fore, who with cattle-thieves and hostile blacks made the squatters on the back blocks keep their eyes skinned, and the banker in the bush townships cash a cheque with one hand, while he kept the other on his revolver.
True the mounted police were very good, none better, but, like the British army, there were not enough of them, and the amount of work in covering, protecting and patrolling such enormous areas of country was far beyond what their limited number could properly do. Indeed, there are plenty of well-known cases where the bushrangers have overcome the police, handcuffed them in their own station, then stuck up the bank and, after raiding the town, started off on the best horses in the place and disappeared into the bush, not to be heard of again until they bailed up a coach, or stuck up some station, perhaps 150 miles away. Well, to get on with my yarn.
Some six and thirty years ago I was on leave in Australia, and was putting in some of it as a guest on a large cattle run and sheep station owned by two old friends of mine who had already become wealthy men, and who owned an enormous number of cattle and sheep.