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Updated: May 23, 2025
The hut was built of slabs, and was divided by a partition into two rooms, and Joe always kept his musket ready loaded, night and day, just inside the doorway of the inner room. Two or three blacks would sometimes call, and ask for flour, sugar, tobacco, or a firestick.
He thought it was a good opportunity of lighting his pipe, lucifer matches being then unknown in the bush; so he dismounted, took out his knife, and began cutting tobacco. The blackfellow asked for a fig of tobacco, and, after filling his pipe, the stockman gave him the remainder of the fig he had been cutting, and held out his hand for the firestick.
It was turned into a tin saucepan; put to boil over a firestick between two more great stones; clarified, by some cunning island trick, with a few drops of cold water; and then served up, bearing, in fragrance and taste, the same relation to average English coffee as fresh things usually do to stale ones, or live to dead.
I was half-asleep, I suppose, and was startled; anyhow, never thinking what I was doing, I picked up a firestick out of the fire and flung it at the 'possum. "Whoop! Before you could say Jack Robertson, that thousand head of cattle were on their feet, and made one wild, headlong, mad rush right over the place where poor old Barcoo Jim was sleeping.
And, after he had kicked Dad and smashed all the swingle-trees about the place, and got right out of his harness a couple of times and sulked for two days, he went well enough beside Anderson's old grey mare. And that season, when everyone else's wheat was red with rust when Anderson and Maloney cut theirs for hay when Johnson put a firestick in his ours was good to see.
He forgot all the early exasperations, remembering only her charms and sweetnesses and glorying much in the traits he at first had disliked most her boyishness and adventurousness, her delight to swim and risk the sharks, her desire to go recruiting, her love of the sea and ships, her sharp authoritative words when she launched the whale-boat and, with firestick in one hand and dynamite-stick in the other, departed with her picturesque crew to shoot fish in the Balesuna; her super-innocent disdain for the commonest conventions, her juvenile joy in argument, her fluttering, wild-bird love of freedom and mad passion for independence.
He stooped to pick up the firestick; but just as he was touching it, he saw the black man's feet moving nearer, and becoming suddenly suspicious, he quickly moved his head to one side and stood upright. At the same instant he received a blow from a tomahawk on his left shoulder.
The grey beards proposed to so astonish Bootoolgah and Goonur as to make them forget to guard their precious comebee. As soon as they were intent on the corrobboree and off guard, some one was to seize the comebee, steal the firestick and start fires for the good of all. Most of them had tasted the cooked fish brought into the camp by the fire makers and, having found it good, hungered for it.
Then up jumped the sick man from behind her, seized the comebee with his combo, cut it open, snatched forth the firestick, set fire to the heap of grass ready near where he had lain, and all before the two realised their loss. When they discovered the precious comebee was gone, up jumped Bootoolgah and Goonur.
After darkness fell we had to follow the tracks with a firestick until we had the fire at camp to guide us. This we reached about 9.30 p.m., fairly tired out, but satisfied that the poor, patient sufferer's life was saved. The others had already started work on the well, but knocked off when I got back, and we had a good feed and a short rest.
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