“I had been introduced a few days since to a cockatoo-squatter, who holds a small run within thirty miles of one of the civilized (?) municipalities in this district.
“‘Come out and stop a few days with me,’ he said, ‘and if you want any native curios, or a skull or two, as you’re a scientist, I’ll see if Sergeant Bedad can come up with his “boys.” No end of sport, can assure you.’ I thought he was making a grim joke,—but you will see. A town councillor who was going my way, to visit a goldmine up on the ranges beyond my destination, offered to show me the way. We started together, and, after about two hours’ ride, as we were entering a piece of scrub, Mr. Councillor pulls out a long-barrelled revolver from his dust-coat pocket, and motions to me to be quiet. Thinking he saw a wild pig or cassowary, I let him go on by himself a bit.
“‘I saw two niggers here, last time I was passing,—last week,’ he explains as I overtake him,—‘they were getting grubs out of that rotten tree, by the bush-layers there; but they cleared off before I could get a fair shot at them.’ I needn’t tell you, old man, that I was astonished at what my companion said; and, getting off my horse to see if he was ‘having me,’ found the print of the niggers’ feet in the black soil, the hole in the rotten tree which they had made in searching for grubs, and lastly, the most circumstantial piece of evidence to prove he was not joking, but terribly in earnest, the bullet-hole of the shot he had fired in a tree stem close by.
“Arrived at the little station, I was introduced to Mrs. Cockatoo-squatter. She was a tall, dark, ladylike person, with something particularly gentle and womanlike about her, that was very charming after the specimens of the weaker (?) sex one generally sees up this way. But she was the next one to startle my new-chum anti-slavery notions. She had no children of her own, but was possessed of two little child-slaves, who, she informed me, the local sergeant of Black Police had kindly ‘saved for her’ out of a camp of blacks he had destroyed four miles down the river. I saw the remains of the ingenious fish-weir erected by these unfortunates one day when out for a ride. These blacks had apparently never injured any one; but, as Mrs. Cockatoo informed me, with a gentle smile, ‘they were always singing or making a noise of some sort, and disturbed the cattle,’ which liked to stand in the shallows near the camp, in preference to merely taking a drink at the steep banks of the other parts of the river frontage. ‘The niggers frightened them; besides, the blacks are always a nuisance.’ So the camp was surrounded one night and ‘dispersed,’—the meaning of which word, in this part of the Queen’s dominions, I have already explained to you.