“Yes,” they replied, apprehensively.
He tilted his hat forward till the brim nearly touched his nose, scratched the back of his long neck, shut one eye, and looked at the river with the other. Then, after spitting half a pint of tobacco juice into the stream, he turned sadly on his heel and led the way back to the pub. He invited the boys to “pisen themselves”; after they were served he ordered out the longest tumbler on the premises, poured a drop into it from nearly every bottle on the shelf, added a lump of ice, and drank slowly and steadily.
Then he took pity on the impatient and anxious population, opened his mouth, and spake.
“Look here, fellows,” he drawled, jerking his arm in the direction of the river, “I'll tell you what I'll dew. I'll bottle that damned river of yourn in twenty-four hours!”
Later on he mellowed a bit, under the influence of several drinks which were carefully and conscientiously “built” from plans and specifications supplied by himself, and then, among other things, he said:
“If that there river rises as high as you say it dew—and if this was the States—why, we'd have had the Great Eastern up here twenty years ago”——or words to that effect.
Then he added, reflectively:
“When I come over here I calculated that I was going to make things hum, but now I guess I'll have to change my prospectus. There's a lot of loose energy laying round over our way, but I guess that if I wanted to make things move in your country I'd have to bring over the entire American nation—also his wife and dawg. You've got the makings of a glorious nation over here, but you don't get up early enough!”
. . . . .
The only national work performed by the blacks is on the Darling. They threw a dam of rocks across the river—near Brewarrina, we think—to make a fish trap. It's there yet. But God only knows where they got the stones from, or how they carried them, for there isn't a pebble within forty miles.