The digger shook his head, and uttered some unintelligible words.
“It’s of no use speaking to him; he don’t understand English,” said Tom Collins, with a somewhat puzzled expression.
The two friends made several attempts to ask him, by signs, where he lived, but they utterly failed. Their first efforts had the effect of making the man laugh, but their second attempts, being more energetic and extravagant, frightened him so that he manifested a disposition to run away. This disposition they purposely encouraged until he fairly took to his heels, and, by following him, they at last came upon the village in which his tribe resided.
Here they found an immense assemblage of men, and women, and children, whose appearance denoted dirtiness, laziness, and poverty. They were almost all in a state bordering on nudity, but a few of them wore miscellaneous portions of European apparel. The hair of the men was long, except on the forehead, where it was cut square, just above the eyebrows. The children wore no clothes at all. The infants were carried on stiff cradles, similar to those used by North American Indians. They all resided in tents, made of brushwood and sticks, and hundreds of mangy, half-starved curs dwelt along with them.
The hero of the hat and boots was soon propitiated by the gift of a few inches of tobacco, and Ned Sinton and Tom Collins were quickly on intimate terms with the whole tribe.
It is difficult to resist the tendency to laugh when a human being stands before you in a ludicrously-meagre costume, making hideous grimaces with his features, and remarkable contortions with his limbs, in the vain efforts to make himself understood by one who does not speak his language! Ned’s powers of endurance were tested in this way by the chief of the tribe, an elderly man with a beard so sparse that each stumpy hair might have been easily counted.
This individual was clad in the rough, ragged blue coat usually worn by Irish labourers of the poorest class. It was donned with the tails in front; and two brass buttons, the last survivors of a once glittering double row, fastened it across the back of its savage owner.
“What can he mean?” said Ned, at the close of a series of pantomimic speeches, in which the Indian vainly endeavoured to get him to understand something having reference to the mountains beyond, for he pointed repeatedly towards them.
“It seems to me that he would have us understand,” said Tom, “that the road lies before us, and the sooner we take ourselves off the better.”
Ned shook his head. “I don’t think that likely; he seems rather to wish us to remain; more than once he has pointed to his tent, and beckoned us to enter.”