“Was your father a Tartar?” was Donald’s next very rude question.
“I dare say he was,” the son answered laughingly, “and he had need to be with such a set of scamps as he had to manage. If you hadn’t kept your eye on them, and let them feel the weight of your hand now and then, they’d have been on you like caged tigers when they see the tamer’s turning funky.”
“If you can’t remember a Wilson, can you remember a body that went by the name of Squinny?” persisted Donald, like a barrister; “and did he take to the Bush because he couldna stand the floggings he got?”
“Squinny! You’re right. I do remember a man of that name. No, he didn’t take to the Bush. He was drowned crossing a creek—at least, that’s what the fellow that was out with him said. By-the-bye, it was this very Old Cranky. But what do you know about him—what makes you ask?”
Then the boys told what they had seen and heard, and afterwards hadn’t seen. Everybody at table, of course, came to the conclusion that Wilson had met with foul play in the gully from Old Cranky, and then been buried there by him in the way he had described.
“If you could find the grave,” said the settler, “I’ll be bound you’d find a cracked skull in it; but of course the old rascal cleared away all tracks of the fence and the rest of it, when Harry put him up to what he’d seen. Besides, what would be the good of finding out anything? You can’t hang the old villain now, and, if he was alive, you’d have hard work to bring the thing home to him. The little I remember, and what he told the boys, is about all the evidence you’d have, and really I don’t remember much, and the old scoundrel was always cranky. Besides, candidly, I don’t see that it would do much good to scrag one villain for knocking another on the head all those years ago. The fellow would have been dead by this time somehow, and perhaps Old Cranky did society a good turn in finishing him off when he did. What do you think, Mr. Howe? I think, for my part, that a good many fellows that could be very well spared have been settled in that way in the colony; just as the ants, they say, eat up the rats and the cockroaches. The curious thing is, that Old Cranky should have taken so much trouble to bury the man decently, with the name and date, and all the rest of it, and then forgotten all about it. But he was always a comical coon, was Old Cranky. A native wouldn’t have done a silly thing like that, Mr. Howe. We’re up to time of day; ain’t we, Harry?”
“Anyhow, we’re a deal better than the English, though I didn’t know you called yourself a native,” answered Harry. “We shouldn’t have any scamps in the colony if it wasn’t for the lot they sent us out from home; though, after all, the old hands are twice the men the new chums are that come nowadays. A set of stuck-up milksops! They don’t know anything, and they can’t do anything, and yet they talk as if they’d done the colony a great honour in coming to it, to be always growling at it because they ain’t ’cute enough to get on here.”
Harry and Donald did not make their appearance at the Wonga-Wonga dinner-table next day. They had started early in the morning for the fern-tree gully, with a pick and a spade, determined to make one more effort to discover the grave and unravel its mystery.
For a long time their hunt was as fruitless as before, but at last Harry cried out,
“I’m almost certain it was somewhere here! Don’t you remember there was a blue gum close by, with a hole that looked like a black fellow grinning, half-way up? There’s the tree—or else it’s the image of it, and I never saw two trees exactly alike before.”