“Missus!” a thin, cracked old voice whispered close to me as I sat sewing one evening. I looked up to see an old, old grey-haired blackfellow standing beside me.
“What name?” I said, feeling rather startled, and then something in his face made me look more closely at him, and I saw that it was Goggle Eye; but oh, such a worn old scarecrow! There was hardly a trace of the merry, laughing rogue, who had gone off, a few weeks before, with his bag of sugar tied round his neck.
“Poor old Goggle Eye!” I said, “whatever has happened?”
“Blackfellow bin sing me deadfellow longa bush,” he croaked in a hoarse whisper. “Flour-bag bin come on quickfellow longa me cobra,” he added, pointing to his grey old head, with its thickly-sprinkled “flour-bag,” as he called the white hairs.
I knew what this singing meant. He had been cursed —as completely as the little thieving “Jackdaw of Rheims”—by the magic men of the tribe. They had bewitched him by singing magic, and pointing death-bones at him, and he would die. Nothing that I could do would save him.
He looked so weak and worn that I gave him some brandy, and he lay down under the verandah. As he lay there, he told me that Tommy Dod, a blackfellow, had carried him thirty miles on his back to bring him in to me and the homestead. Tommy Dod was his younger blood-brother, and it was his duty to help the poor old fellow.
I called Tommy, and told him to make a bark humpy at the camp. He did this, and then carried Goggle Eye up to it, and lit his fire. Then we rolled him up in a blanket and gave him some food, and very soon the poor tired old King was asleep.
In the morning I took him up some arrowroot, and persuaded him to eat it all, telling him that it often killed blackfellow’s magic. I knew that if only I could make him believe this, I might cure him. After he had finished, I sat down in the camp, and Billy Muck, Jimmy, Tommy Dod and Goggle Eye told me all sorts of wonderful tales about “singing magic” and “bone-pointing.”
There are many ways of killing by magic, and if a blackfellow wants to get rid of an enemy, it is a much safer way than spearing, because he will not run any chance of being hurt himself, unless some one finds out who did the bone-pointing; when, of course, he would be “sung” in turn by way of revenge.
The way of killing by bone-pointing is this:—the blackfellow takes a sharp-pointed bone—the Roper blacks prefer a kangaroo’s, but some tribes say that a dead man’s bone is best; this bone is stuck in the ground, and the would-be murderer bends over it, and “sings magic” into it.