At the time appointed I went with a horse and sledge to the wood, but was much surprised to find that my master was not at the spot where he said he would be;—a surprise which was not a little increased by perceiving, from two or three felled sticks that lay around, that he had been there, but had done little—so little, that he could not have been occupied, as I calculated, for more than a quarter of an hour. Thinking, however, that wherever he had gone he would speedily return, I sat down to await him; but he came not. An entire hour elapsed, and still he did not make his appearance. Beginning now to suspect that some accident had happened him, I hurried home to inquire if they had seen or heard anything of him there. They had not. His family became much alarmed for his safety—a feeling in which my conscience forbids me to say that I participated.
Two of my fellow-servants now accompanied me back to the wood, which it was proposed we should search. This, so soon as we had reached the spot where my master had appointed to meet me, and where, as already mentioned, he had evidently been, we began to do, whooping and hallooing at the same time to attract his attention should he be anywhere within hearing.
For a long while our searching and shouting were vain. At length one of my companions, who had entered a tangled patch of underwood which we had not before thought of looking, suddenly uttered a cry of horror. We ran up to him, and found him gazing on the dead body of our master, who lay on his face, transfixed by a native spear, which still stood upright in his back. It was one of those spears which the aborigines of New South Wales use, on occasion, as missiles, and which they throw with an astonishing force and precision.
Such, then, was the end of this cruel man; and that it exceeded his deserts can hardly be maintained.
Luckily for me, my period of service with my late master was at this time about out. A few days more, and I became entitled to my ticket of leave. For this indulgence I applied when the time came, and it was immediately granted me for one year. On obtaining my ticket I proceeded to Sydney, as the most likely place to fall in with some employment. On this subject, however, I felt much at a loss; for not having been bred to any mechanical trade, I could do nothing in that way. Farming was the only business of which I knew anything; and in this, my father having been an excellent farmer, I was pretty well skilled. My hope, therefore, was, that I would find some situation as a farm overseer, and thought Sydney, although a town, the likeliest place to fall in with or hear of an employer. On arriving in Sydney, I proceeded to the house of a countryman of the name of Lawson, who kept a tavern, and to whom I brought a letter of introduction from a relative of his own who had been banished for sedition, and who was one of my fellow-labourers in the last place where I had served. On reading the letter, Lawson, who was a kind-hearted man, exclaimed—
"Puir Jamie, puir fallow; and hoo is he standin't oot?"
I assured him that he was bearing his fate manfully, but that he had been in the service of a remorseless master.
"Ay, I ken him," said Lawson. "A man that's no gude to his ain canna be gude to ithers."
"You must speak of him now, however, in the past tense," said I. "Mr.——- is dead."
"Dead!" exclaimed Lawson, with much surprise. "When did he die?"