"Him go after bullock. Not long him come back. You wait?"
This was a re-assuring start, anyhow.
Wait? Rather! Though I badly wanted to push on to Barrow's Creek I would have waited a week, could it have been so arranged, to see this man—for the bare sake of having one good look at him, for the possibility of a hand shake from him.
For I had heard of him, though never previous to my passing Oodnadatta. And I had heard of his lion courage from those who must themselves be brave men. I knew of the spear marks he bore, and how it was he came to bear them; yet fearlessly as ever remaining here by himself for months at a stretch, a kindly master to a horde of athletic treacherous savages, with not the slightest chance of anybody coming to his assistance should he ever be in need of aid!
When, after a couple of hours "wait," I saw him riding up, I felt no pang of disappointment; he looked in full the hero I had pictured him. I managed an indifferent-sounding "Good day—a bit hot?" and looked away over to where stood his horse; but I watched him with a leaping, boyish happiness through the corners of my eyes, and there came again and again to my mind the expressive deliberate words of more than one quiet-spoken old bushman—"Ah! But it is he who is the grand man!"
There was no doubt that I was outside the pale of civilization now; he had heard nothing of a cyclist being on the road.
There was no occasion to tell him I was hungry. A welcome feast was soon prepared, and I ate—no, I fear, I gorged.
And what a mine of information is this man himself! What would he not be worth to the interviewer? But he talks with more than the modesty of the bushman, and that is saying much.
The natives now-a-days along the overland track are not, in his view, quite so black as they are painted in the imagination of some residing south of Alice Springs. Articles might be pilfered from a camp left without anyone in charge, but otherwise the natives near the wells and on the road might generally be looked upon by the passer-by as harmless, if properly handled. To east and west, however, are several places in which the natives are "cheeky." "And," added my host, "some 'bad' fellows now and again find their way into the Bonney"—a fresh water well to which I had not yet come.
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