Alas! and alas! this was a breakfast no one who sat down to, and who lives, is ever likely to forget.
Have you ever, reader, been startled on a bright sunshiny summer's day by a thunder-peal? And have you seen the clouds rapidly bank up after this and obscure the sky, darkness brooding over the windless landscape, lighted up every moment by the blinding lightning's flash, and gloom and danger brooding all round, where but a short half-hour ago the birds carolled in sunlight? Then will you be able, in some measure, to understand the terribleness of the situation in which an hour or two after breakfast the party found themselves, and the awful suddenness of the shock that for a time quite paralyzed every member of it.
They had left the dismal depths of the forest, and were out on the open pasture-land, and nearing Findlayson's house, when Craig and Archie, riding on in front, came upon the well-known bobtailed collie, who was the almost constant companion of the squatter. The dog was alive, but dying. There was a terrible spear-gash in his neck. Craig dismounted and knelt beside him. The poor brute knew him, wagged his inch-long tail, licked the hand that caressed him, and almost immediately expired. Craig immediately rode back to the others.
"Do not be alarmed, ladies," he said. "But I fear the worst. There is no smoke in Findlayson's chimney. The black fellows have killed his dog."
Though both girls grew pale, there were no other signs of fear manifested by them. If Young Australia could be brave, so could Old England.
The men consulted hurriedly, and it was agreed that while Branson and Harry waited with the ladies, Archie and Craig should ride on towards the house.
Not a sign of life; no, not one. Signs enough of death though, signs enough of an awful struggle. It was all very plain and simple, though all very, very sad and dreadful.
Here in the courtyard lay several dead natives, festering and sweltering in the noonday sun. Here were the boomerangs and spears that had fallen from their hands as they dropped never to rise again. Here was the door battered and splintered and beaten in with tomahawks, and just inside, in the passage, lay the bodies of Hurricane Bill and poor Findlayson, hacked about almost beyond recognition.
In the rooms all was confusion, every place had been ransacked. The furniture, all new and elegant, smashed and riven; the very piano that the honest Scot had bought for sake of Elsie had been dissected, and its keys carried away for ornaments. In an inner room, half-dressed, were Findlayson's sister and her little Scotch maid, their arms broken, as if they had held them up to beseech for mercy from the monsters who had attacked them. Their arms were broken, and their skulls beaten in, their white night-dresses drenched in blood. There was blood, blood everywhere—in curdled streams, in great liver-like gouts, and in dark pools on the floor. In the kitchen were many more bodies of white men (the shepherds), and of the fiends in human form with whom they had struggled for their lives.
It was an awful and sickening sight.