United States or Eritrea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The boys were all from a sand-hill tribe who bitterly hated the wild warraguls from the mountains, and they were overjoyed at the thought of fighting on the same side as white men. Sax and Vaughan were more serious but none the less eager, especially Sax, who would have willingly gone out alone against the whole tribe, if only it would have been a help to his father.
The warraguls listened, swaying their bodies as Arrkroo swayed his, and breaking out at times in wild shouts of agreement. Arrkroo was an orator in his primitive way, and he now had his audience completely at his command. He could do what he liked with it.
The crowd of frenzied warraguls, eager to pull him limb from limb, leaned forward, but he still held them with his fearless eye. How long would it last? Arrkroo danced nearer and nearer. When one of those whirling arms of his touched the victim, the spell would be broken, and Boss Stobart, the bravest drover of Central Australia, would go down before the onslaught of a hundred yelling fiends.
Everybody present knew the fate of the white prospectors, and that if once the secret was known, such a rush would set in that the warraguls would be driven out of this, their last great stronghold. Arrkroo turned towards Stobart. Every man in the gathering looked at him also. "See," shouted the Hater in the native tongue. "See. White man. He find gold. His tracks all around Pool of Skulls.
He want run away. He come back soon. Kill black-fellow. Kill black-fellow. Kill black-fellow." He stopped speaking and stretched out his painted arm towards the drover. The warraguls leapt to their feet, their eyes blazing, and their bodies ready to spring upon the white man. Stobart got up from the ground very slowly and faced his enemies, staring steadily at them. His hour had come.
Stobart knew that he had a powerful foe. The drover had succeeded in making a friend of the man with the mutilated left hand, but had not been able to overcome the hatred of the most influential man in the tribe. The upshot of the adventure was that Boss Stobart was forced to accompany the tribe of Musgrave warraguls back to their mountain fastnesses.
Suddenly in the middle of the wildest demonstration of grief Coiloo appeared Coiloo, whom Stobart had saved from death, and whom Mick had treated with such cruelty. He was in a shocking state. The brand-marks had started to fester, and there were burns all over his body. He had come at a critical time. The wailing warraguls looked at his wounds and their excitement got more and more intense.
By his constant association with the warraguls, he picked up a good deal of their speech, and was soon able to carry on conversations with them, supplying anything he did not know by gestures, which are the same all over the world. After several weeks had gone by in this way, and he had made no attempt to escape, he started to go hunting with only a few natives instead of with a big party.
"These niggers are wild and scared to death of white men. They're different from the camp blacks who hang round stations. They'll likely be station blacks themselves some day, for the wild nigger's dying out. But just now, they keep away and live their own lives. We call them warraguls." Stealthy Foes Next morning, when the horses came in, two were missing. "Which way them two horses sit down?"
Word Of The Day