'That's true enough.... But if you could see Castle Gaverick! My old Aunt is always talking of restoring it, but she never will, and if my cousin Chris Gaverick ever does come into it, he'd rather spend his money in doing something else.... But never mind that.... I want to hear about the black gin and the half-caste girls, and if your mother saved them from the cannibals ... and why the blacks wanted to eat their own kind. Dog doesn't eat dog—at least, so they tell one.'
'It's this way. Our blacks weren't regular cannibals, but in the bunya season they'd all collect in the scrubs and feed on the nuts and nothing else for months. Then after a bit they'd get meat-hungry, and there not being many wild animals in Australia and only a few cattle in those outlying districts, they'd satisfy their cravings by killing and eating some of themselves—lubras—young girls—by preference, and, naturally, half-castes, as having no particular tribal status, for choice.'
'Half-castes!' She repeated, a little puzzled.
'These ones had Chinky blood in them—daughters of a Chinaman fossicker.... We're not partial to the Chinese in Australia—only we don't eat them, we expel them—methods just a bit dissimilar, but the principle the same, you see.... Anyway, of course we took on the gin and her girls, and for about a year didn't have any particular trouble at the station with the blacks—though there was a shepherd speared in one of the out-huts.... That was his fault, however, poor devil—the old story—but it don't matter. The trouble came to a head with a black boy, called Leura-Jimmy, that Jerry the bullock-driver brought up with him and left at the station where he went down to the township for store supplies—He took me with him—I told you I was learning bullock-driving....'
McKeith paused, and the dark look came upon his face.
'And Leura-Jimmy?' put in Bridget.
'Oh, he was a fine, big fellow—plausible, too, and could speak pidgin English—he was never weaned from his tribe, and he was a treacherous scoundrel at heart.... As a precautionary measure, my father forbade the blacks to come up to the head-station. But Jimmy fell in love with the eldest of the half-caste girls. She encouraged him at first, then took up with one of the stock-boys....
'It was the bunya season again, and the girls' old tribe, under their King Mograbar—a devil incarnate in a brute—I sent him to Hell afterwards with my own hand and never did a better deed'—McKeith's brown fists clenched and the fury in his eyes blazed so that he himself looked almost devilish for a moment. His face remained very grim and dour as he proceeded.
'Jimmy had got to know through the half-caste girl about our ways and doings, and he made a diabolic plot with King Mograbar to get the blacks into the house.... Every living soul was murdered ...surprised in their sleep ... My father ... my mother ... my sisters ... God! ... I can't speak of it....'
He got up abruptly, jerking his long legs, and went to the further end of the veranda, where he stood with set features and brows like a red bar, below which staring eyes were fixed vacantly upon the avenue of bunya trees in the long walk of the Botanical Gardens across the river. But they did not see those bunya trees. What they saw was a row of mutilated bodies, lying stark along the veranda of that head-station on the Leura.