[4]
]‘Hrrmp! hrrmp!’ blared Greg, in friendly greeting, as he caught sight of the figure staring fascinated.
And then he laughed to himself as he saw how the loose horses, snorting with terror, galloped off one way, and the horseman another.
But it was getting late; so, coming out of the water, and striking a well-beaten pad, he followed it. Supper time was approaching, and he kept his ears open for the shrill cry of Hassan Ali.
Meanwhile Steve had made a bee-line on the spur for home, with some vague idea surging through his dull brain of having caught a glimpse of an Avenging Power. It is mostly in this way that anything of the sort strikes the uneducated conscience.
‘What’s the matter now?’ asked his wife as he entered, pale, and with hurried steps. ‘You looks pretty badly scared. Did the traps spot yer a-plantin’ them mokes, or what?’
‘Traps be hanged!’ replied Steve. ‘I seen somethin’ wuss nor traps. I seen the bunyip down at the big waterhole.’
‘Gam, yer fool!’ exclaimed his wife, who was tall, thin, sharp-faced, and freckled, like himself. ‘What are you a-givin’ us now? Why, yer gittin’ wuss nor a black fellow wi’ yer bunyips!’
‘Well,’ said Steve, fanning himself with his old cabbage-tree hat, and glancing nervously out of the door, ‘I’ll tell yer how it was. Ye knows as how I dropped acrost that darkey’s mokes when he was camped at the Ten Mile. Well, o’ course, I takes ’em to the water in the [5] ]scrub—you knows the shop—intendin’ to hobble ’em out till such time as inquiries come this road. Well, jist as I gets in sight o’ the water I seen, right in the middle of it, I seen—I seen—’ but here he paused dead for want of a vocabulary.
‘Well, thick-head, an’ wot was it ye seed—yer own hugly shadder, I s’pose?’ said Mrs Brown, as she caught up and slapped the baby playing with a pumpkin on the floor. ‘Look better on yer, it would, to wind me up a turn o’ water, an’ it washin’ day to-morrer, ’stead o’ comin’ pitchin’ fairy stories.’
‘It warn’t,’ replied Steve, taking no notice of the latter part of her speech. ‘But it was as big—ay, an’ a lot bigger’n this hut. All black, an’ no hair it was; an’ ’t’ad two white tushes’s, long as my leg, only crookt, an’ a snout like a big snake, an’ it were a-spoutin’ water forty foot high, and soon’s it seen me it bellered agin and agin.’