* * * *
It may have been reality, or it may have been fancy; certainly I heard a rustle, and sat up quickly.
Three blackfellows were walking towards where I lay. At the instant of seeing them they were scarcely half a dozen yards off. I did not move—where was I to move, and why?
"What name you wantem?" I asked.
As none of them had on anything more than what looked like a piece of old clothes line with the frayed ends knotted together in front, with boomerangs thrust through it at the sides, and as each carried a woomera, or throwing stick, and a spear, they appeared to be quite respectable wild savages.
It is at such moments that a self-respecting person should, in a twinkling, live his life over again—he should look down through the corridors of his years, and renounce all his wickednesses.
Also the armed and treacherous natives; these denizens of the wildest tract of the Australian continent, descendants of those (or maybe the men themselves) who have murdered settler and traveller in cold blood—these formidable fellows, I say, should have raised a whoop, and casting their spears at my prostrate form, should then have robbed me of the few trinkets I possessed, and my revolver, and have left another carcase to tell silently of the infamy of the black people.
But things go wrong. For my own part, instead of looking back through any corridors, I observed that the feet of my visitors were much larger than were those of the natives south of the Alice. And, instead of a war-whoop and a deadly lunge, one of the three stretched out a hand and whined the single word "Baccy?"
And this is the romance of our Dark Continent!