“Yes, master.”
“Yes,” Drysdale continued, “Bimbi went out with a police expedition against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother’s head off. As a race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty. They will track their own brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the whites. As a race they are treacherous and vile, though as individuals they may have good points.”
“No, Cadi,” once more added Barlas, “we can get along very well without your consolidated statutes or High Courts or Low Courts just yet. They are too slow. Leave the black devils to us. You can never prove anything against them in a court of law. We’ve tried that. Tribal punishment is the only proper thing for individual crime. That is what the nations practise in the islands of the South Seas. A trader or a Government official is killed. Then a man-of-war sweeps a native village out of existence with Hotchkiss guns. Cadi, we like you; but we say to you, Go back to your cultivation-paddock at Brisbane, and marry a wife and beget children before the Lord, and feed on the Government, and let us work out our own salvation. We’ll preserve British justice and the statutes, too. ... There, the damper, as Bimbi would say, is ‘corbon budgery’, and your chop is done to a turn, Cadi. And now let’s talk of something that doesn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth.”
The Cadi undoubtedly was more at home with reminiscences of nights at the Queensland Club and moonlight picnics at lovely Humpy Bong and champagne spreads in a Government launch than at dispensing law in the Carpentaria district. And he had eager listeners. Drysdale’s open-mouthed, admiring “My word!” as he puffed his pipe, his back against an ironbark tree, was most eloquent of long banishment from the delights of the “cultivation-paddock”; and Barlas nodded frequently his approval, and was less grim than usual. Yet, peaceful as we were, it might have puzzled a stranger to see that all of us were armed—armed in this tenantless, lonely wilderness! Lonely and tenantless enough it seemed. There was the range of the Copper-mine hills to the south, lighted by the wan moon; and between and to the west a rough scrub country, desolating beyond words, and where even edible snakes would be scarce; spots of dead-finish, gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and east, and in the trees by the billabong the cry of the cockatoo and the laughing-jackass. It was lonely, but surely it was safe. Yes, perhaps it was safe!
It was late when we turned in, our heads upon our saddles, for the Cadi had been more than amusing—he had been confidential, and some political characters were roughly overhauled for our benefit, while so-called Society did not escape flagellation. Next morning the Cadi left us. He gave us his camps—Bora Bora, Budgery-Gar, Wintelliga, and Gilgan—since we were to go in his direction also soon. He turned round in his saddle as he rode off, and said gaily: “Gentlemen, I hope you’ll always help to uphold the majesty of the law as nobly as you have sustained its envoy from your swags.”
Drysdale and I waved our hands to him, but Barlas muttered something between his teeth. We had two days of cattle-hunting in the Copper-mine hills, and then we started westward, in the tracks of the Cadi, to make for Barlas’s station. The second day we camped at Bora Bora Creek. We had just hobbled the horses, and were about to build a fire, when Bimbi came running to us. “Master, master,” he said to Drysdale, “that fellow Cadi yarraman mumkull over there. Plenty myall mandowie!”—(‘Master, master, the Cadi’s horse is dead over there, and there are plenty of black fellows’ tracks about.’)
We found the horse pierced with spears. The Cadi had evidently mounted and tried to get away. And soon, by a clump of the stay-a-while bush, we discovered, alas! the late companion of our camp-fire. He was gashed from head to foot, and naked.
We buried him beneath a rustling sandal-tree, and on its bark carved the words:
“Sacred to the memory of Stewart Ruttan.”
And beneath, Barlas added the following: