But the lad was prepared even for this. Away out on the end of the boom he stood, with his hand on the flying jibstay, and when the dog was within a few feet of him, he grasped the hoops of the sail which were around it and went up the log rope like a squirrel.
The mad dog made a sort of half leap, as if to reach him, staggered, lost his balance, and fell with a splash under the ship’s bows.
Probably the sudden immersion threw him into one of those convulsive fits so common in the rabies, for, after a few minutes of violent tumbling, he sank outright, and we saw no more of him.
“Now,” said Captain Gale, after all was over and the ship had been put upon her course, “I’ll finish catching my porpoise.”
And, sure enough, upon going to his line, he found the iron still fast to it.
During the remainder of the voyage, concluded Captain Peyton, little Roy Drew was the hero of the ship. He had performed what all the rest of us combined had been unable to accomplish, and even the captain gave him full credit for his gallant act.
[THE BOOMERANG.]
Since the memorable time when Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1769 and saw the naked native Australian poising erect to hurl his peculiar weapon, the boomerang has continued to excite the curiosity and amazement of the civilized world; and truly the finding of such a scientific weapon in the hands of this so-called lowest order of mankind is an astonishing fact, to be simply accepted as another oddity of this odd, topsy-turvy corner of the world.
This novel weapon became an intensely interesting object to me very soon after arriving in Australia; and for the purpose of studying it, I went persistently among the black fellows, whose friendship I cultivated in different ways, and so succeeded eventually in learning how to make and throw the boomerang. So far, well and good; but of its history I could learn nothing. Of the origin of the crooked stick there is no knowledge; one can only conjecture. It is possible it may have been born with the race itself from the accidental throwing of a flat stick; for from childhood the black fellow shows a natural bent for throwing things, as you can see by watching him use his only other weapons, the spear and club. The bow and arrow, so common in other lands, is not used, except in the extreme northern portion of the great island continent, where there is a mixture of the race with the Papuan of New Guinea.