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.
194

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.
195

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.
197

“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?”
198

After a good many brushes in the scrub, the black fellows grew more used to fire-arms, and ventured down one night upon the station buildings. Fortunately it was moonlight, and Donald, who chanced to be awake and looking out of the window, could plainly distinguish the invaders as they crept out of a patch of scrub about a couple of hundred yards off, and came crouching towards the huts with their noses almost touching the moonlit grass.

“Sydney! Harry!” he shouted, “here come the blacks!” and snatching up his gun, he deliberately levelled it, and let fly at the foremost black fellow.

When the blacks found that they were discovered, they sprang up erect, streaked and spotted with white and red clay, daubed on in stripes, and hideous faces, brandishing their spears, waving about their boomerangs and waddies, knocking their bark shields together, and advancing rapidly in a wild tramping dance to a horrible chorus of “Wah! wah! wah!”
199

But Donald’s shot had aroused all the white folk. Handsome Bob was strong enough to fire a gun then, and rushing to his window, he was the first to follow suit to Donald. Five marksmen were soon popping away incessantly. A shower of missiles whizzed through the moonlit air, and hurtled against the slab sides and bark roofs of the huts; but several of the blacks were down on the ground, and more had been slightly hit. Leaving their dead and badly wounded, the blacks turned and fled in disorder, and the five whites, who had defeated more than a hundred savages, sallied from their cover flushed with victory, and commenced an incautious pursuit. In their contempt for their enemy, they straggled from one another, and whilst they were thus giving chase, a tall black suddenly sprang from behind a tree, stunned Harry with a blow of his waddy, and carried him off.
200

When Harry came to himself, he was lying in a black fellows’ encampment. It was broad daylight. The wounded warriors were crouching here and there, with earth instead of ointment stuffed into their wounds. The unhurt warriors, for the twentieth time, were bragging about their prowess. The gins had already celebrated it in a song, which they sang as they dragged a water-hole for fish, with a mat rather than net of twisted grass, and as they squatted on the ground inside and outside the gunyahs—conical huts of bark and wild vine—that were scattered about and clustered together under the weeping acacias. Grey, glistening bark canoes were lazily rubbing their sides together on a large lagoon hard by. “Tamed” dingoes slouched at their masters’ heels, or snuffed about the gunyahs, gaunt as starved wolves. One woman was suckling alternately her own piccaninny and a puppy dingo! Two or three of the gins were guarding some opossums that were being cooked under a round layer of stones, on the top of which the kitchen fire was kindled. (Sometimes, instead of using this oven arrangement, the blacks bury their game, unskinned, in the hot ashes). The men had nothing on but a strip of kangaroo-skin round their loins, but the women wore kangaroo and ’possum rugs.
201

When Harry came to himself, he ached all over, and felt so stiff, that, although he was not bound, he could not rise from the ground. He fell sometimes on his face, and sometimes on his back, when he attempted to get on his feet. Some black boys who were standing near jeered at him when they saw this, and pricked him with their spears, at the same time mimicking his motions, like so many monkeys. But an old black, who was sitting with his back to the tree under which Harry was lying, left off nursing his knees for a minute, waved the young rascals off, and beckoned to a party of old gins to come near. These old ladies felt Harry all over, and when they found that no bones were broken, they took off his clothes, and began to dig their skinny black fists into him as if they were kneading bread. Then they dipped him in a water-hole, and, after he had lain down to dry, they trotted him about till all his aches and pains were gone, and he was able to eat a hunch of baked ’possum with relish—strong as it did taste of peppermint—even though he could not help seeing that he was being attended to in this careful way simply that he might give his captors more sport afterwards, when they began to torture him. But one of the old women who had kneaded Harry had noticed a mole on his back which was very much like one that a dead son of hers had on his back, and so the old woman had come to the conclusion that her dead son had “jumped up white-fellow,” as the blacks phrase it, in Harry. The other members of the tribe opposed this view, and there was a hot argument about it, in which, although it lasted for an hour, the name of the dead son was not once mentioned—the Australian blacks carefully abstaining from naming their dead. At the end of this controversy Harry was placed on a little mound, and a shield was given him; three of the adroitest spear-throwers being stationed at some distance opposite to hi............