"Don't you hear?" I called out. "I want to ask you about the road." But he only wanted to stand on his confounded head.
I rather regretted having put him up to the wrinkle; the track from the well might be in any direction.
"Me give it you that fellow stick of tobacco all the same you stand up," I said.
Again he only muttered a choking "Me do it all right," and again another try.
But it was all of no avail. He couldn't stand on his head and I couldn't stop him from trying. His face might long since have grown purple; but I was unable to see. His ulster would hang downwards and get in the way.
"What infernal nonsense," I said impatiently to myself. Here was I, in the heart of a continent, miles from any other white man, my sole companion an unknown black, myself ignorant of the track, and paying for the freak of a moment in this absurd way.
"Hanson" was still struggling. I gave him up as hopeless, got into the saddle, and wheeled away.
I wonder if "Hanson" has done it yet, and if upon the strength of it he's been raised in rank in his tribe!
* * * *
Those aborigines are a perverse lot. Bushmen and those who have long lived at the telegraph stations or at Port Darwin agree that you can never rely upon astonishing them. Take a tribesman from the inlands, as the native police have sometimes had occasion to do, show him the "mighty ocean," and he regards it stolidly; and so with many of the marvels of civilisation. But do some fantastic trick or show him some simple, gaudy thing, and he is transported.