In about six weeks Jack was able to travel, and Mr. Fetherston gave us an escort to Port Darwin.
After about ten days there, we were so fortunate as to get a passage to King George’s Sound in a Government steamer. We reached Adelaide about the first week in September.
CONCLUSION.[ [267]
My story is told now, and there is no occasion to detain you much longer. Our life ever since we came back to Adelaide, until the visit to Gippsland which led to the writing of this book, was all of a piece. It was all spent in Australia and Tasmania. We did some squatting, and we just glanced at agricultural and mining life. In every year we spent some weeks in town, and we made some acquaintance everywhere. But we settled down to nothing. We became very little richer, but no poorer. We seldom talked about our adventures to each other, and never to anyone else. But I think they were always more or less in our minds and kept us unsettled.
Sometimes when we seemed to be forgetting them, or when their effect upon us appeared to be passing away, something or other would happen to revive their memory and unsettle us again.
Once, for instance, I was in Sydney with Jack [268] ]making arrangements for the purchase of a share in a small station. I was dining out one evening on the North Shore and as it chanced Jack was not with me. There was a physician of the company who was a clever talker, and after the ladies had gone away we got him to tell us some of his Australian experiences, which were curious and varied. He told us among other things that he was employed by Government to make a report on some cases in Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum. After he had examined these cases the superintendent of the asylum said,
“By the bye, doctor, I have a queer fellow here that I sometimes think ought not to be here at all. He is an interesting fellow, too, and I should be much obliged if you would have a look at him.”
“I did have a look at him,” said the physician, “and I found him just a steady old bush hand, with an uncommon degree of intelligence and good sense, and a lot of information about the country and the aborigines. I was just wondering what on earth they could have sent him here for when he told me with the gravest face the following story:—He had been more than a year among the blacks and he did not know how he was to get back to his own people. It was away in the north-west somewhere, the far north-west. Well, one [269] ]day, he said, there was a sort of panic among the blacks, he didn’t know the cause of it, and he wandered away a mile or two from the camp. He said that when these panics take them they are jealous of the presence of strangers. He had a loaded revolver with him.
“There was no sun and he began to think he might lose his way, and so he made up his mind to return to the blacks’ camp. Just then he heard a sort of rustle in the air above him, and presently a man, so he said, jumped out of the clouds and caught him by the collar of his coat. He said that this man never touched the ground himself, but tried to lift him off the ground. He drew his revolver and fired.
“Then he said—‘Look here, doctor, I’m blest if the fellow didn’t turn into bilin’ water and then into steam and then into nothin’ at all, and while I was wonderin’ what in the mischief war the matter with me back he comes again, fust steam, and then bilin’ water, and then an ugly tawny-looking beggar, neither nigger nor white man, and makes another grab at me. So I said, Man or devil, have at you again, and I gave him the contents of another barrel, and I’m blest if he didn’t go of in a bile again and I took to my heels and ran as I never ran before until I got back to the darkies’ camp.’ That was his story,” said the physician, “and it appears that [270] ]he was picked up some months later on the headwaters of the Oakover River by some explorers, and so he got round to Adelaide, and thence to Sydney, and so found his way to the asylum.”