“’Mongst thousand dangers, and ten thousand magick mights.” Fa?rie Queene.
 N
EXT morning, when Claude wandered into the supper-room of the previous night, he found a couple of fat, comely young native women, in short, light-coloured frocks, relaying the cloth upon the table for a second or late breakfast.
 
One of these girls on seeing Claude toddles up to him, and explains, in the ridiculous jargon she has been taught to consider English, that Mr. Giles and the young ladies have already partaken of breakfast and gone out.
 
“Marmie bin go out longer Missie Lillie, um Missie Gory bin go longer Marmie big fellow way.”
 
“What name?” she adds briefly, bringing her 253 beautiful eyes and smiling features to bear upon Claude with awkward suddenness as she puts her question.
 
In reply Angland bashfully but carefully explains to the gins how his name is usually pronounced by himself and friends; but the girls only grin in return with their pearly rows of teeth, as if they are the victims of suppressed mirth. They are evidently highly amused, and even retail some joke to the diminutive Lucy, who, seeing that something out of the ordinary is going on, has popped her little black head in at the door to listen.
 
“What name, Marmie?” the smiling “lubras” repeat in chorus.
 
Whilst Claude stands puzzling over the mystic meaning of the dark fair ones before him, Mr. Cummercropper enters the room, and nodding to our hero—and thereby losing his eyeglass for a few seconds—proceeds to tediously deliver the same message Angland has already received. Claude waits till the ?sthetical station storekeeper has finished, and then begs him to enlighten him as to the meaning of the laughing girls.
 
“Ha! ha!” chuckles Mr. Cummercropper out of the depths of his high collar. “Bai Joave! not bad, by any means. They don’t want to know your name. Picked that much up long ago. ‘What name?’ means, in this part of the globe, ‘Which will you have, coffee, tea, or cocoa, for breakfast?’ Don’t it, Dina?”
 
Dina grins a comprehensive smile, and nods her brilliantly beturbaned head in reply to the query; and, obtaining a satisfactory answer at last to her254 oft-repeated question, trots her buxom little figure away into the kitchen. After breakfast Claude spends his morning in trying to learn something of Billy; but he is almost entirely unsuccessful, as the blacks about the station are strangely reticent. The disappearance of his late uncle’s servant is very annoying to Angland, and our young friend is really puzzled to know what steps he had better take next. Claude has a lonely lunch, for none of the station folk are yet returned, and Mr. Cummercropper has descended from the art student to the “rational” storekeeper, and has started off in a buggy and pair with a load of “rations” for a far-off out-station; and then, getting a “boy” to fetch his horse in from the paddock, he canters over to an out-station, where he left his miner friend and the two boys the night before.
 
“Well, lad, thou hast not been successful in thy work,” says old Williams, Claude’s digger companion as he observes that young man’s disappointed face. “And that I were right to camp here I’ll show ye. There’s nowt save ourselves here, for they’re out must’ring ‘weaners.’ So coome inside out of the sun, and I’ll tell thee news o’ Billy.”
 
Claude watches his lively purchase, Joe, hobble the horse, and then follows Williams into the two-roomed shanty, which is honoured by the name of an “out-station house.” It is merely a roughly-built hut, with walls of gum-tree slabs laid one upon another, and a roof formed of sheets of brown gum-tree bark. The studs of the building, also the rafters and purlieus, are ingeniously kept in position by neatly fastened strips of “green hide” (raw leather), and the hard grey floor and colossal chimney-place are composed of the 255 remains of a number of ant-hills that have been pounded up for the purpose. The material of which these hills are built is a kind of papier maché, consisting of wood-fibre and clay, and is in much request amongst northern settlers for various structural purposes. The termites, or “white ants,” sometimes raise their many-coned mounds to a height of from twelve to fifteen feet, and these “spires and steeples,” with the absence of dead tree-stems upon the ground,—another sign of the presence of these insects,—are two of the most characteristic features of the open bush country of Northern Queensland.
 
Williams squats down on his hams, bush-fashion, in front of the yawning fireplace, where a camp-oven, suspended over the grey embers, is frizzling forth the vapoury flavour of “salt-junk,” and after lighting his pipe proceeds to tell Claude what he has found out from the stockmen. This, to condense the lengthened yarn of the old miner, is just what Billy related of himself, in our presence, to the old “hatter” Weevil in the lonely jungle cave.
 
“He’ll coome back here, I tell ye. For note ye, lad, he camped as long as he could at Murdaro, till they made him clear.”
 
“Yes, I believe he was waiting there for me,” responds Claude.
 
“Now, mind ye,” continues the digger, gesticulating with his maize-cob pipe, “mind ye make every nigger round know that yer wants to find Billy, and ye’ll hear of him soon, like enough. Now the more ye gets known here the safer fur ye, so wait here till the men get back. Ye can pitch ’em a song after supper and ride home with the head stock-keeper. He’ll be256 going up to ‘Government House’ to-night. Moon rises ’bout nine.”
 
Half an hour before sundown a dust cloud that has been slowly travelling for the last two hours across the plain, in the direction of the out-station, reaches its destination. It is now seen to be caused by the feet of a small “mob” (herd) of cows and unbranded calves. These, after much yelling and an accompanying—
 
“Running fire of stockwhips,
And a fiery run of hoofs,”
are at last forced down a funnel-shaped lane between two wide fences, called “wings,” into the receiving yard of a large stockyard near the house.
 
Not long afterwards the head stock-keeper and his two white stockmen appear; and the former, after being introduced to Claude, and having indulged in a very necessary wash, sets the example, which is soon followed by the other men, of proceeding to work upon the evening meal. This is placed upon the table by two dark-skinned nymphs, whose airy costume consists chiefly of one old shirt and a pair of smiles between them.
 
The position these girls occupy in an establishment where all are bachelors may be guessed, and Claude learns, before the meal is over, that they are under the “protection” of the white stockmen, having been “run down” for this purpose some months previously.
 
“Run away!” laughs one of the stockmen, skilfully supplying his mouth with gravy by means of his knife-blade, as he repeats a question put to him by Angland before answering it. “Run away! No, I 257 rayther think as ’ow Nancy was the last gal as will ever try that game agin. The black beggars know what they’ll get for trying the speeling racket here. Short and sharp’s our motter on this here station,” the speaker adds, as his savoury knife-point disappears half down his gullet.
 
Upon Claude expressing a wish to hear about Nancy’s ultimate fate, the men become reticent; but Claude learns afterwards on good authority that the unfortunate girl was overtaken whilst attempting to return to her tribe, and was flogged to death before the other native station-hands, “pour encourager les autres.”
 
After the whites have done their meal, the black stockmen are handed their “rations,” which consist of the broken viands from the table, and such pieces of “junk” as have become tainted. The whole amount does not seem very much for the eight “boys” after their hard day’s work in the saddle, and when they have further sub-divided it with their relatives at the black camp close by, their earnings for the day must appear very small indeed.
 
Selfishness is unknown between relations amongst aborigines. There is no meum et tuum. A hunter’s spoil or a “boy’s” earnings are given away immediately upon his return to camp; and the individual who has obtained the good things generally keeps less than his own proper share, being complimented upon this by the women in a low chant or grace during the eating or cooking of the food.
 
It seems probable, however, that if the right of purchasing their liberty was permitted to the station blacks, and each “boy” was allowed his peculium,258 as instituted by Justinian, the first anti-slavery emperor of Rome, this unselfish division of each day’s wage would soon become out of fashion. It is, perhaps, in order to encourage this virtuous practice of their station slaves that the Australian squatters have never followed the example set them by the ancient Romans.
 
The head stock-keeper, whose name is Lythe, but who is generally known upon the station as “the Squire,” is a very different kind of man to his two stockmen. These individuals belong to a much lower type of humanity, and are apparently without any education whatever, save a superficial knowledge of horses and cattle.
 
Born of good parentage in an English “racing county,” Lythe is a fair average sample of a certain class of men not very uncommon in up-country Australia. Life’s chessboard has been with him an alternating record of white, glowing triumphs, and black disgrace of wild, feverish saturnalia and rough toiling at the hardest kinds of colonial work. A wild boyhood, a wilder time at Sandhurst, a meteoric existence as Cornet in a lance regiment,—with the attendant scintilla of champagne suppers, racehorses, and couturières,—and then he slipped on to a “black square” and became a “rouseabout” on an Australian run. Presently he rises again, by making for himself a bit of a name as a successful “overlander” or cattle-drover, and, becoming rich, moves “on to the white.” He is a squatter, takes up-country, loses all, and then becomes an irreclaimable tippler. “Black square” again, and here he is, working hard to “knock up” another cheque,—a well-educated, useful 259 member of society when free from liquor; a wild, quarrelsome savage from the time he reaches the first “grog-shanty” on his way “down south,” till he returns “dead broke” to “knock up another cheque” at the station.
 
Claude’s hosts at the little out-station—who, like most Australian colonists, are as hospitably minded as their means will allow them to be—do all they can to render his visit to their rough home as agreeable as possible. They even indulge him with a few bush songs, whilst the after-supper pipe is being smoked. One of these, sung in a voice gruff and husky with shouting to the cattle all day, to the air of a well-known nautical ditty, is descriptive of the first “taking up” of the Never Never Land, and has a taking chorus, concluding thus:—
 
“Then sing, my boys, yo! ho!
O’er desert plains we go
To the far Barcoo,
Where they eat Ngardoo,
A thousand miles away.”
At nine o’clock “the Squire” and Claude say good-bye to the others, and mounting their horses, which have been brought up to the house across the dewy, moonlit pastures by a pair of attendant sprites, proceed leisurely in the direction of the head-station.
 
Around the riders stretches the tranquil indigo and silver glory of a marvellous phantasmagoria, painted by earth’s cold-faced satellite. And accustomed to the softer beauties of a New Zealand moonlight night, Claude cannot help exclaiming to his companion upon the strange, phantom-like appearance that all the 260 familiar objects around him appear to have put on beneath the argent rays. Even that most unpoetical object, the stockyard, where the imprisoned cattle are roaring impatient of restraint, seems, with its horrid carcase gallows, all dressed with a silvery, mystic robe of light, as if transformed into a spectre castle, filled with moaning, long-horned beings of another world.
 
“Yes, that is so,” returns Claude’s companion, when our young friend has remarked the curious features of the scene before him. “What you notice is just what is the chief characteristic of an Australian moonlight scene. The only real poet Australia’s ever had was Lindsay Gordon. He was an Englishman, by-the-bye, and he has the same sort of weird touch running through all his poems. But it isn’t so much to my mind,”—the speaker rubs his chin thoughtfully,—“it isn’t that the moonlight is different here to what it is elsewhere, I fancy, so much as it is that Nature herself puts on an outlandishly-awful, God-forsaken, ghastly kind of rig-out, when left to herself in these wilds.”
 
“That’s very true,” responds Claude, looking at the dreary scene of broken sandstone cliff and dead forest through which their horses are picking their way.
 
“Now, really, Mr. Angland, what a devilish nightmare of a place this ‘outside’ country is. Look at those ghostly, white-stemmed gums. I’ve heard those trees groan like dying men when there was hardly a breath of air moving. Why, there! you can hear them for yourself now. And, like all their kind, at midday they cast no shadow; and therefore might261 well be considered bewitched, if we went by the old standard of ancient European justice, that considered this infringement of the natural laws the very earmark of Satan’s cattle. Look at our deserts, our old volcanoes, our fishes that run about on the shore like mice, our rivers of sand, and—but we need not go farther than our wild animals. What artist—Griset, Doré, or any one else—ever conceived a more impish brute than the dingo, or a more startling caricature of a deer with grasshopper’s legs than we find in the kangaroo?”
 
The dree wail of some neighbouring dingoes upon the distant hills comes as a sort of unearthly murmur of acquiescence, as the speaker closes his remarks.
 
“Why, really,” remarks Claude, laughing quietly, “now that you point it out, there is really something curiously nightmare-like about Australian nature.” He adds after a pause, “You would be a grand hand at telling a ghost story.”
 
The two men canter over a smooth piece of country in silence; and when their horses have again come within easy speaking distance, “the Squire” asks Claude if he would like to hear a ghost yarn.
 
“I’m touchy, rather,” goes on “the Squire,” “on the subject of this the only ghost that I have ever seen; and I give you warning you mustn’t scoff at me for believing in it. I haven’t told any one about it since,—well, it don’t matter when. You’re not in a hurry to get to the station, I suppose?”
 
“Oh, the yarn, by all possible means!” assents Claude.
 
But his companion does not hear the reply to his question, for as he loosens the flood-gates of his262 memory there rushes vividly before his mind a long-forgotten scene, like a weird picture from a magic lantern, shutting out all external things,—a scene of moonlit rock and dark, gloomy trees, of sleeping cattle, of wild and awful midnight terror.
 
But it is only for an instant. Then he pulls himself together, and half unconsciously lifts his hand to wipe away the cold dew that even the memory of that fearful night has called forth upon his brow.
 
“You must know then,” commences “the Squire,” after the manner of Master Tommie in “Sandford and Merton,” “that, like most new chums in Australia, I wandered about a good deal over this great, sunburnt island before ever I settled down as head stock-keeper at Murdaro. During part of that time I followed the calling of an overlander. An ‘overlander,’ Mr. Angland,—for, as you haven’t any of the breed in New Zealand, I’ll explain what that is,—is Queensland-English for a long-distance drover; and a rough, hard life it generally is. Cattle have to be taken long distances to market sometimes from these ‘up-country’ runs. I have taken several mobs of ‘fats’ (fat bullocks) from the Never Never Land to Sydney,—a distance of about fifteen hundred miles.
 
“Now, when my story begins I was ‘boss’ of a road-party taking fat cattle down to Sydney from Contolbin station on the Lachlan. In fine weather, when there’s plenty of grass or herbage, and water every twenty miles or so, a drover has rather a jolly time of it, after he’s trained the cattle to camp properly, take it altogether: an open-air life, with just enough exercise to make him enjoy his ‘tucker’ (food). But, like most lines of life, there are more 263 bitters than sweets connected with the ‘overlanding’ profession. Sometimes there’s no water for forty, fifty, perhaps ninety miles at a stretch,—for instance, on the Birdsville and Kopperamana track,—and keeping awake for days and nights together, you must push on (with the sun at 120° in the shade, sometimes) taking your cattle, at their own pace, along the Parakelia-covered sand-hills till the next water-hole is reached. And at other times there is too much water, and it is a case of swimming rivers every few miles, or else sitting down for a stream to run by for a few weeks,—riding through mud, sleeping on mud, drinking mud, and eating it too, for the matter of that, for weeks at a time. I’ve done that at the Wyndham crossing of the Cooper more than once. But on the particular trip I am going to refer to, the weather was more what you, as an Englishman, will understand better than most Australians, for it had been snowing hard for several nights in succession upon the Swollowie Mountains, over which our road, from Orange to Bathhurst, lay, and the air was almost as cold and chilly as it ever is in the old country.
 
“I never shall forget the sight that poor old Sanko, one of my native boys, was when he came off the middle watch, the first night we reached the high country. Sanko was a ‘white-haired boy’ when he came off watch to call me that morning, and no mistake about it, although his waving locks and beard had been as black as night the day before.
 
“No, Mr. Angland, he hadn’t seen a ghost! You’re a bit too fast.
 
“But he had seen something strange to him, and 264 that was a fall of snow. And when he poked his head in at the door of the ‘fly’ (tent) and called me, his good-humoured, hairy face was white with snow crystals. He really gave me a kind of ‘skeer,’ as our American cousins call it, for a moment. He looked like the apparition of some one I had known in life. I thought I was dreaming at first; and I had had fever a little while before, and was still rather weak from its effects. I mention this because the scare Sanko gave me may have made a more lasting impression upon me than I thought at the time, and had something to do with what happened the next night. All I did at the time, however, was to tell Sanko not to call the next watch, as the cattle would not shift in the snow. And rolling myself up in my blankets, I was soon asleep again.
 
“One of the greatest hardships of cattle droving is the watching necessary at night. All sorts of things may occur to frighten them; and when that does happen, off they rush, a resistless flood of mad animals, into the darkness, breaking each other’s necks and legs, and the remainder getting lost. Cows that want to return to where they dropped a calf will sometimes start a mob. The cunning brutes will watch you as yo............