When Sydney’s party had left that last run, and crossed a wide stretch of dry scrub country, they struck a creek shaded by red gum-trees, and ran it down until they came to what was, for Australia, a fine river. Fig trees and pines—all kinds of trees—laced together with creepers and wild vine, grew thick along the river’s banks. They were pink and purple and crimson and yellow with wild flowers, and big white water-lilies with huge green leaves almost paved the water inshore. There were wild fowl, too, in the river; and scores upon scores of pigeons, bronzewings, and green and purple wompoos, were feasting on the wild figs and cherries, and making them patter down like rain. Besides a host of little birds, there were snowy cockatoos and flashing parrots and lories galore, and sometimes a paddymelon was seen.
“Just won’t we blaze away, Donald!” cried Harry, in ecstasy.
But what pleased Sydney more was the grassy, light-timbered land, that stretched like a wild park for miles on both sides of the river. He determined to seek no farther, and as soon as he had pitched his camp, he was in the saddle again, and off to mark out his run. He scored the bark of a tree from which he started with his initials, and then rode a dozen miles or more, and slashed another tree with his tomahawk. In that free-and-easy fashion he took possession of all the land between the trees for ten miles on both sides of the river. Then he galloped into camp again, and scribbled off a rough description of the district he had taken up for the Crown Lands Office, using the dray for his writing-desk. With this specification Prince Chummy was sent back upon their tracks to the nearest post-office. It was by no means certain that Prince Chummy would return, although he did seem so fond of his young master, since black fellows are very fickle; but he could best be spared from the station when hard work had to be done—that being an occupation not at all to a black fellow’s taste. He might safely be trusted to post the letter, since Sydney had made him believe that it would come back to tell of him if he didn’t.
Whilst he was away Sydney and Jim and Bob set to work at timber-felling and splitting, whilst Harry and Donald in turns mounted guard over the stores or looked after the cattle. Before Prince Chummy got back, a store had been run up, and a hut for Sydney and the boys, and another for the men, and the stockyard was nearly finished. Masters and men fared very much alike. In neither hut was there any superfluous furniture. The bedsteads were bullocks’ hides stretched on posts driven into the ground. All this time not a black had been seen at Pigeon Park, as Sydney had christened his station. They came often enough afterwards, as you will read in my next chapter; but in this I have only room to tell how they first made their appearance there.
One evening the cattle and horses had been driven into a grassy horseshoe peninsula made by the winding river, not far from the huts. Sydney and the men had knocked off work, and were sitting, smoking, on their verandahs, and the boys were out with their guns. Presently Harry cried out,
“Hark! I can hear a horse galloping yonder. Perhaps it’s Chummy come back. Let’s go and meet him.”
When Donald put his ear down to the ground, he heard the hoofs quite plainly, and agreed to go. As a rule, young Australians think it is necessary to ride when they set out anywhither of set purpose. They will take the trouble of running a horse up from a flat almost a mile off in order to ride a mile. But if the boys had gone back then for their horses, the chances were that the horseman, whoever it was, would get to the station almost as soon as they did; so they trotted off on foot. In a few minutes the rider topped a rise, and though the setting sunlight bathed him in bright blood, they could make out that it was Chummy. He reined in as he drew near the boys in a place in which there was a belt of scrub on both sides. He was grinning, and shouting back greetings to his young friends, when from the scrub on both sides whizzed a flight of spears. Poor Chummy, bristled like a porcupine, fell forward on his horse’s neck, clutching the mane with the rigid grasp of death, and the fear-maddened horse, which had been wounded in the neck itself, rushed past the boys like a whirlwind. Out of the scrub darted a score or two of darkies, dancing and jabbering, “Wah! wah! wah!” like angry apes, and advancing on the boys with brandished spears and wildly-waved boomerangs and waddies.
“I did feel funky then, and no mistake, Mr. Howe,” Harry afterwards told me; “but, you see, if we’d shown the white feather then, it would have been all up with us. So we turned round and stared at the blacks.
“‘We must pepper them,’ I said to Donald.
“‘Ay, lad; but ane at a time, and then load whilst the ither is firin’,’ says Donald.