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And now a wretched little pastoral town; a collection of glaring corrugated-iron hip-roofs, and maybe a rotting propped-up bark or weather-board humpy or two relics of the roaring days; a dried-up storekeeper and some withered hags; a waste of caved-in holes with rain-washed mullock heaps and quartz and gravel glaring in the sun; thistles and burrs where old bars were; drought, dryness, desolation and goats.
It was Sam that coined and, with the aid of his sycophantic following never wanting to a bully, fastened to the child the nickname of "Humpy Wicksy," working thereby writhing agony in the lad's highly sensitive soul. But Sam did not stay his hand at the infliction of merely mental anguish.
His meditations were so prolonged that they grew nervous. "I reckon they could spare ut, after all ye done fer 'em, Hop," remarked Humpy. "They's millionaires, an' money ain't nothin' to 'em," said The Hopper. "We can buy a motor-truck," suggested Mary, "to haul our stuff to town; an' mebbe we can build a new shed to keep ut in."
Shaver expressed alarm at the thought of leaving his chicks; whereupon Humpy conferred two of them upon him in the best imitation of baby talk that he could muster.
He generally dozed and rested beside the humpy during the afternoon, preparatory to hunting in the dusk for the kill that represented his night meal.
All day long the wind had been blowing very hard, and Stingy had to rebuild a great many cobwebs that were blown down. Suddenly he started up. Something was struggling in his web. What do you suppose it was? Nothing less than a beautiful little yellow-winged moth that was caught and was beating his wings and fluttering to get out. Stingy rose slowly and moved his humpy shoulders toward the moth.
Humpy was thwarted in an attempt to pry into the contents of the basket by a tart reprimand from The Hopper, who with maddening deliberation drew forth the two glazes, found that they had come through the night's vicissitudes unscathed, and held them at arm's length, turning them about in leisurely fashion as though lost in admiration of their loveliness.
With a small party, consisting of convicts and their guards, he landed at Redcliff, now known as Humpy Bong, a peninsula which juts out into Moreton Bay a few miles above the mouth of the Brisbane. Here the settlement remained for a few months, but afterwards it was moved twenty miles up the river to that pleasant bend which is now occupied by the city of Brisbane.
The last turn of the deep-rutted, sandy road where it left the river's bank and led straight between two humpy shoulders of rock to the foot of a platter-shaped valley brought him to a halt again in sheer astonishment. From behind a low hill still farther to the right, where the road forked again, a bluish haze of smoke indicated that there was a town of some sort, perhaps.
They seem prone to enjoy the present, forgetful of the past and regardless of the future happily, I say, for those humpy and hairy creatures are not unacquainted with man's devices the sudden surprise, the twang of the red-man's bow and the crack of the hunter's rifle.
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