If Warrigal had not bailed up little Harry, most likely he would not have been taken; for when Harry had got to Jerry’s Town, he would have found all the troopers away except one. In the scrub, however, Harry heard the sergeant and his men returning from a wild-goose chase they had been sent on by the bush telegraphs, and managing at last to spit the gag out of his mouth, he had given a great co-oo-oo-oo-oo-ey!
After that night Miss Smith always called Sydney Mr. Sydney, and Sydney let Harry ride Venus as often as he liked.
II.
UP A SUNNY CREEK.
Soon after his adventures with Warrigal, Harry Lawson had a tutor to teach him instead of Miss Smith, and when Harry was twelve, his cousin, Donald M‘Intyre, who was about his own age, came to live at Wonga-Wonga to share the tutor’s instructions. Harry considered this a very jolly arrangement. Like most Australian boys, he was a very quick little fellow, but he was inclined to be rather lazy over his lessons; and Donald helped him in his Latin and French exercises, and made his sums come right for him, and yet was just as ready for a spree out of school as Harry was. Donald, too, had been born in the colony, and so the two boys got on famously together.
One Christmas the tutor had gone down to spend his holidays in Sydney, and Harry and Donald could do just as they liked. The papers were full of some traces of Leichhardt, the brave Australian explorer, that had recently been discovered, and the boys, of course, had read “Robinson Crusoe” also; and so they resolved to set out on a secret exploring expedition. They determined to go by water, because that would be both more like Robinson Crusoe, and more of a change for them. They were very fond of riding, but still they were as used to riding as English boys are to playing at “foot it,” and they had been only once or twice in the “cot” which a North of Ireland man, who had come to the station as a bush carpenter, had finished the week before, that the station people might be able to cross the creek in time of flood, when no horse could swim it or ford it.
One broiling December day—there is no frost or snow, you know, in Australia at Christmas-time—Harry and Donald slipped down to the cot directly after breakfast. They had a gun with them, and caps, and powder, and shot, and colonial matches in brown paper boxes, and some tea, and sugar, and flour, and three parts of a huge damper (that’s a great flat round cake of bread without any yeast in it), and a box of sardines and a can of preserved salmon, that Sydney had given them out of the store, and some salt, and two pannikins, and a Jack Shea (that’s a great pot) to boil their tea in, and a blanket to cover them by night, and to hoist now and then as a sail by day. The cot had no mast, but they meant to use one of the oars for that, and they had cut a tea-tree pole to serve for a yard.
They were going up the creek, not down. They knew that the creek ran into the Kakadua at Jerry’s Town that way, and, of course, as explorers, they wanted to go where they had not been before. So they shipped their stores, and untied the painter—it was twisted round an old gum tree on the creek-side—and pushed off from the bank, and began to try to pull up stream. But they could not row nearly so well as they could ride, and at first they made the cot spin round like a cockchafer on a pin. They were sharp little fellows, however, and soon got under way, only catching crabs when they tried to feather.
By the time they got abreast of Three-Mile Flat, though, their arms ached; and Harry stopped pulling, as he made out, to tell Donald again about Warrigal, and Donald stopped pulling, as he made out, to listen to Harry, although he knew the story by heart. Then they gave a spurt, and then they stopped pulling again, and hoisted their blanket on one oar, and tried to steer with the other; but it was a long time before they could manage this properly. The sail was for ever flapping against the mast—taken aback, as the sailors say—or else the cot was poking her nose into the tea-tree scrub on one side of the creek or the other, as if she wanted to get out of the hot sunlight into the moist shade. Still, it would have been very pleasant, if there had not been quite so many mosquitoes; but they hummed over the water in restless clouds like fountain-spray. However there were native vines, with grapes like yellow currants, twining round the lanky tea trees and lacing them together; and the bell-birds kept on dropping down into the scrub, and flying up into the gum trees, and calling ting-ting, ting-ting. It sounded like a dinner-bell, and the boys determined to take an early dinner. They ate up almost all their damper, and all their sardines, and picked their dessert off the wild vines.
On they went again; but they had not gone far before they came to what is called in Australia a “chain of ponds.” The creek had partly dried up, and they had to pull and push the cot from one pond to another. This was hard work, and not very pleasant work either, for the sand-flies got into the corners of their eyes as if they wanted to give them the blight, and the leeches crawled up their trousers and turned their white socks red with blood. Their heads throbbed so that they could hardly bear to hear the locusts—thousands of them—clattering on the trees like iron-ship wrights hammering, and they felt quite angry when the long-tailed, brown coach-whip bird flew by, making a noise just like a slavedriver cracking his lash. At last, however, they got into clear water again—clear except for the grey snags and sawyers—and paddled lazily along; listening to the twittering wood-swallows as they dipped their blue wings into the water, and the great, black, sharp-winged swifts screaming for joy as they tacked high overhead. Harry and Donald could not help wishing that the cot (which they had christened the Endeavour, in honour of Captain Cook) would dart along of herself like the swifts.
It had taken such a time to get her through the chain of ponds, that evening was coming on. Great flocks of cockatoos were circling round their roosting-trees like English rooks, and parrots and lories—their fine green, and red, and blue, and yellow feathers beginning to look very dull and ragged, because moulting-time was near—were taking their evening bath in the shallow water by the banks, splashing it over their heads and wings, and chattering as if they were saying, “Isn’t this prime fun?” Presently the cockatoos lighted on the dark trees, and made them look as if a hundred or two of ladies’ pocket-handkerchiefs had been hung out to dry on them, and then the boys thought it was time to find a roosting-place themselves. They pushed the cot into a little bay in the bank, and fastened her to an old black stump, and then they scooped a hole in the ground for a fireplace, and gathered sticks, and lighted a fire. But when they were going to cook their supper, they found that they had lost their flour, and that their sugar-bag had got so wet that there was only a little sweet mud left in it. But that did not matter nearly so much as the loss of the flour. They boiled their tea, and sweetened it with the mud, and after a good deal of trouble they got the salmon-tin open. Harry, who was very hungry, was for finishing the salmon and what was left of the damper; but Donald said,