“THE SNAKES CORROBBOREE.”
“I’ll go bail ye niver see the like of that afore,” said Old Cranky. “Ain’t it a pretty sight? I niver showed it to nobody afore. I likes to come an’ watch ’em by myself. Me an’ the dog, that is. Lag likes it ’most as well as me. Fan, there, is afeard. She stayed outside, ye see.”
The boys felt almost as afraid of Lag and Old Cranky as they were of the snakes when they heard of such peculiar tastes. Heartily glad were they when they joined the kangaroo-bitch outside the horrible basin, and they felt relieved, too, when they reached a track they knew, and the crazy old snake-charmer slouched off on his way to the next station with his dogs behind him.
Tired as they were with their long walk when they got back to Wonga-Wonga, Harry and Donald did not have “pleasant dreams and sweet repose” that night. They both of them dreamt of the Snakes’ Corrobboree; and, I scarcely need say, they never took the trouble to find their way to it again.
V.
LOST MAGGIE.
Black fellows and old bushmen—and young bushmen too, for the matter of that—cannot make out how it is that “new chums” lose themselves in Australia. They can tell which way to go by the place of the sun, and the dip of the country, and all kinds of little things that new comers would not understand even if they noticed them; and so they laugh at new comers for getting lost. But for all their bumptious talk, people of “colonial experience” sometimes get lost in the bush, and are never heard of again, like ships that have gone down at sea without any surviving eye, except God’s, to see them sink.
Sad stories are told about these poor lost people. Sometimes they disappear for ever, like rain-drops swallowed by the ocean; sometimes they are found wandering about mad; sometimes they are found starved to death; sometimes just dying. Sometimes a heap of picked and bleached bones is found, with nothing to tell the name of the person whose flesh has been torn or has rotted off them. Sometimes the name, and one or two sprawling, half-unintelligible words have been feebly scratched on the pannikin that rusts hard by.
You may fancy, then, how dreadfully frightened a mother in the bush is when her little child is missing. But, though some of the little strays are never recovered, a great many of them are wonderfully protected, and come upon at last. It is about a little girl that was lost in the bush that I am going to tell you.
One morning I had ridden over to Wonga-Wonga, and was having lunch with Mr. Lawson and Sydney, when Mrs. Jones rushed into the room, crying as if her heart would break.
“Oh, master,” she sobbed out, “I can’t find my Maggie; an’ I’ve been seekin’ her an hour an’ more. Oh! it was you who persuaded Jones to come when you was over at home, an’ if you don’t find my Maggie, I shall do myself or some on ye a mischief, I feel sure I shall. Oh, oh, oh! my ’ead feels fit to burst!”