'Go on. What do the Blacks do now to you people to make you treat them unkindly?'
'What do they do now—to us squatters you mean?' Colin had recovered himself. 'Why they begin by spearing our cattle and then they take to spearing ourselves.'
'Did they ever spear you?' she asked.
Colin smiled at her grimly.
'Well, you wouldn't have noticed, of course, that I've got just a touch of a limp—it's only if I'm not in my best form that it shows. I owe that to a spear through my thigh one night that the Blacks rushed my camp when I was asleep. And I'd given their gins rations that very morning.'
'And then?' Lady Bridget's voice was tense.
'Oh then—after they'd murdered a white man or two, the rest of us whites—there wasn't more than a handful of us at that time up on the Leura—banded together and drove them off into the back country. We had a dangerous job with those Blacks until King Mograbar was shot down.'
'King Mograbar! How cruelly unjust. It was his country you were STEALING.' She accentuated the last word with bitter scorn.
'Well! If you come to that, I suppose Captain Cook was stealing when he hoisted the British flag in Botany Bay,' said McKeith.
'And if he hadn't, what about the glorious British record, and the March of Civilisation?' put in Vereker Wells.