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Updated: June 27, 2025
Sax told him, and the drover remarked: "I'm glad you did. Nothing stirs things up so much as a saddled horse with nobody on him. You and your mate had better have a drink of tea with me. By the way, what do they call you?" "That chap's name's Vaughan," answered Sax. "Mine's Stobart." "What? Stobart? Same name as Boss Stobart?" "Yes. He's my father."
He danced before his listeners, lifting his striped legs high, and swaying his body this way and that till the designs in white and red hypnotized the natives and held them spell-bound. Even Stobart felt the evil power of the man.
Stobart sat up, prepared for anything which this black-fellow who knew the father, and seemed so devoted to the son might suggest. The man pointed down across the trampled sand towards the cattle-troughs. He did it again and again, making little runs in that direction and coming back at once, like a dog who wants its master to go in a certain direction.
Soon after this Coiloo told Stobart about the expedition which was about to set out against Mick's party travelling to Sidcotinga Station.
Everybody crawled under bushes and stunted trees and went to sleep. Now was Stobart's chance. He signed to Yarloo. The faithful boy had not followed his natural desires to eat as fully as his fellow-tribesmen had done, but had kept himself ready for any emergency which might occur. "We go 'way now, Yarloo, I think," whispered Stobart. "Which way horses go?" The boy pointed in a certain direction.
But gradually Pat had won him over, for in the veins of every bushman runs enough gambler's blood to make the sporting risk of a gold-mine very alluring. The two men wrote to Sergeant Scott, of Oodnadatta, who was a great friend of both of them, and arranged that they would start out for the Musgraves as soon as Stobart had delivered the cattle.
The other was limping slightly. It was Yarloo, the boy who had been thrown from his horse. He had got a job with the drover the morning after the delivery of his midnight message to Saxon Stobart, and, because he was a stranger, his fellow stockmen took a great delight in limping about and imitating him. "So that's how you got your ride," said the drover. "How did you catch the horse?"
The white man's thirst was now so great that he was about to start running down to the water which lay so invitingly some twenty yards away, when something white caught his eye. It looked like the Southern Cross worked out in perfectly white stones on the surface of the sand near the water-hole. Stobart did not run. An uncanny feeling came over him.
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.
Stobart could have had one of these, but as the former occupant had not left it as clean as a white man likes his home to be, he chose a small cave a few yards above the camp. This gave him the considerable advantage of being away from the dogs and smell which are inseparable from a blacks' camp.
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