“He’s a cool customer, is Donald, with his t’anes and t’ithers. We hadn’t much time to talk, for I saw one of the beggars just going to let drive at us, so I up with my gun and let drive at him. I was loaded with duck-shot, and though it scattered, I must have spoilt his beauty, for the blood came streaming down his face. It was queer to see how scared the big beggars were—over six foot some of ’em were. They couldn’t have been much used to powder. They all of them stopped short when they saw the blood, as if they’d all been shot.
“‘Don’t wait for me,’ I said to Donald, when I was going to load again; but, though he gave ’em both his barrels pretty quick when he saw how things were, he only marked ’em behind. They’d all turned, and before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ they’d vanished in the scrub. Syd and the men weren’t long in rushing up, I promise you; but there was nothing left for them to do. Poor old Chummy was as dead as a doornail by that time. We buried him before we went to bed, with some of the spear-heads still sticking in him. We couldn’t have got ’em out without tearing him all to bits. I suppose the beggars had got it into their heads that he’d brought us, and so wanted to finish him off first. It’s strange the down black fellows have on black fellows. Poor old Chummy! And yet, after all, if you think of it, you can’t blame the beggars. I can’t see what right we whites have to this country. If you were to get up at night and see a fellow helping himself to your swag, you’d do your best, I guess, to shoot him if he wouldn’t bundle out. And that’s how the blacks must feel when they see us taking up their country. It sounds soft, and yet I can’t help half wishing sometimes that they were as ’cute and as plucky as the Maories. They won’t stand nonsense, for all your English red-coats; though the soldiers and settlers between them might eat up every Maori, if they could only catch ’em and kill ’em. There’s enough of ’em to do it.”
XI.
PIGEON PARK.
After that first brush, the blacks still for a time kept clear of the station buildings, but, now here, now there, they were always giving unpleasant proofs of their presence on the run. It was, in fact, the best bit of their hunting-ground, and therefore it is not astonishing that they considered the whites, instead of themselves, to be the trespassers. The black fellows speared the cattle and horses, and tried hard to kill the men and boys too. They had to look about them “with all their eyes” when they were riding past any cover.
Once Handsome Bob was missing for a couple of days. When he was found he was almost dead; for the blacks had knocked him off his horse with a boomerang, gashed him with their tomahawks, prodded at him with their spears till his flesh was like a perforated card, and then tied him to a tree which ants had connected with their hill by a little sunken path like a miniature railway-cutting. The ants and the flies had made an awful object of poor Bob’s patchwork of wounds; and though he did at last most marvellously “recover,” as it is called, he was half silly ever afterwards. Jawing Jim was kinder to him than you would have expected whilst he lay helpless in the hut, and Sydney and the boys, of course, looked in, and did what they could for him. But for hours he had to be left alone, with the chance that the blacks would swoop down upon him and finish their work. When he did get about again, although half silly in other things, he had a strange, fierce knack of surprising black fellows, and potting them from behind a tree as if they had been so many wild ducks.
Long before Handsome Bob was up again, his mates had been forced, as they thought, to be almost equally savage. Whenever they saw a black, they tried to kill him, as “naturally” as one tries to kill a snake or a wasp or any vermin. It is not pleasant to have to write about such things, but I must if I am to tell the whole truth about Australia. Sydney soon got quite envenomed against the blacks, whom he had robbed of their hunting-ground, because they were killing off his cattle; and not long afterwards Harry and Donald fully sympathized with him. Not one of the three felt the slightest scruple in shooting down a black, and then cutting off his head and hanging it in terrorem on a tree, as a gamekeeper nails a hawk against his gable. There is a terrible amount of the tiger in human nature. When blood has once been tasted, so to speak, in savage earnest, “civilization” peels off like nose-skin in the tropics, and “Christian” men, and even boys, are ready—eager—to shed blood like water. They are not eager to talk about what they have done when they get back from the Bush amongst their mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts; but then, they think white mothers, &c., are so different from black gins and their offspring—and when the white women hear of what the black fellows have done or tried to do to their darlings, they are very apt to frame excuses for the white atrocities which they dimly guess at when they kneel beside their beds at night to give God thanks for their darlings’ return to districts in which it is possible to go to a “real church” and “regular services” every Sunday. Jawing Jim wanted to “polish the blacks off” like dingoes, by setting baits of poisoned food about the run; but at poison Sydney drew the line, and the boys, who were half startled by the kindliness with which they had taken to their killing work, could not help feeling relieved at finding that the line was to be drawn anywhere.
“No, Jim,” said Sydney. “Fighting’s all fair. If we didn’t shoot down the blacks when we came across ’em, they’d precious soon spear us. But it’s sneaking to poison the beggars, when they haven’t a chance of hitting back.”
“Boot ye poiason the warrigals, Mester Sydney, an’ ah kent see as there’s mooch to choose atween the two soarts o’ warmin.”
“P’r’aps there isn’t,” answered Sydney. “But anyhow there’s something of a man, so far as look goes, in a black fellow; and so we’ll fight fair. I’ll have no strychnine used—do you understand, Jim?”
“Ah oonerstaun’,” growled Jim, “boot thee doosn’t. Pooder or poiason—wha-at’s the oadds?”