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Updated: June 7, 2025
After watching the return of the tribesmen, and hearing the chief medicine-man explain that Why-Why's body had been carried away by "the bad black-fellow with a tail who lives under the earth," Why-Why enjoyed the pleasure of seeing his kinsmen and his foes leave the place to its natural silence. Then he found words, and poured forth his heart to Verva.
The old man caught the rhythm and the words and took them up, beating time with his withered hands; and as he did so, the others joined in the dance, the instincts of the black-fellow only in their beings the instincts which brought back to them the impulses which moved their forbears, the instincts which made them fling aside the methods and the fear of the white man, as they had flung away the clothes of which they had learned the need from him.
"We'll not drink it till sunrise to-morrow.... But, look here," he exclaimed suddenly, realizing for the first time the tremendous sacrifice the black-fellow was making. "Look here! We mustn't take your tea. It's yours, Yarloo. Yours," he repeated, in order to make his meaning clear. But Yarloo had already begun to scrape a hole in the sand.
Walker no longer breathed, Gleeson had not moved, and the black-fellow lay where he fell, on his back, with a red stain spreading from a spot on his chest over the smudges and smears of the wet white clay. "It's saved me a lot of trouble," he remarked callously, as he went to the fire and threw more wood on to it.
The white man calls it the coal-sack, and explains how it comes about. The black-fellow looked at it in wonder, and worked his brains for the reason of its existence and the use that it might serve, and gradually, unconsciously, inexplicably, there crept into the lore of the nomad tribes the story of its origin and the use it had to serve.
Looking down he saw his brother, and called to him, and, to help him up, threw down a rope, up which the brother climbed. But when he also reached the plain, he wanted to turn back and go down again, and lowered the rope to do so; but before he could start, he saw that another black-fellow had caught hold of the rope and was climbing up.
It was still an hour before sunset when Boss Stobart, after giving the cattle a final inspection, was riding back to camp to make a damper and cook a bucket of meat, when he was startled by seeing a boot track. They were in totally uninhabited country, and the sight was just as startling as a naked black-fellow in the middle of Sydney in the busy part of the day would be.
To this rough generalisation, to be sure, two special exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow himself, and the dingo or wild dog whose ancestors no doubt came to the country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with George I. of blessed memory.
Can we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the graveside of the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to the young initiates as the priest does to-day to those assembled before him in church for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations have always been before all things the occasions of moral and social teaching?
Looking at Mick with fierce hatred, he backed slowly step by step till he was about fifty yards away, when he turned and ran for his life. Mick fired a parting shot after him, but it was not necessary. The branded black-fellow did not stop till he was out of sight over the first sand-hill.
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