Free Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction by James Doig Page B

collared every kid in camp, with the assistance of old Jimmy and his harem, that we found the missing articles—a boot on one, a spur on another, and so on. I don’t know whether they thought I should be willing to take Tommy out of the town in a state of nudity or not, or whether I should just get him some more outfits, until I had clothed the lot of them, but my determined move euchred them all together. So I made Master Tommy put on his duds one by one, ’til he arrived at hat and boots, with a circle of worshippers round him, telling the frightened youngsters that if I caught them again dividing my black boy’s raiment amongst them I should have them all hung by the policeman on the big windmill at the town stockyard, concluding:
    ‘Then you baal jump up white fellow, hang alonga sky, wokkaratchies (crows) eat ’em up.’
    “You never saw such a scare. And old Jimmy, the chief, quite believed it, and yabbered and howled like blazes to all the ‘gins’ within a quarter of a mile. Then they began to bring in the rest of the missing articles, but two little wretches had torn Tommy’s good Crimean shirt in half to make, as they explained after much browbeating and threatening, ‘two little pfeller blankit’. And one of the junior members of Jimmy’s seraglio appeared with the collar worn as a necklet. That collar was her sole apparel. However, things simmered down after a bit, and I gave old Jimmy half a stick of Barrett’s twist, and bought Tommy another shirt. I made him sleep in an outhouse near the stable in the back-yard after this, but one morning early I caught two other urchins ‘coiled’ with him, the whole lot under his blanket. They were also ‘cousins,’ and had arranged to work with him in relation to the horses, hoping, I have no doubt, to get stray bits from the breakfast that my lord did not want himself.
    “But it ended in these two others having a separate ‘mess,’ which I paid for. The hot tea with their breakfasts must have comforted their small ‘tums,’ and I never like to put obstacles in the way of praiseworthy energy. So Tommy slept warmer at night, and I was the richer by two first-class trackers.
    “Eventually I took these boys with me, and they turned out well, and were very useful. And my boy, Tommy, never dared to speculate after this with his clothes. Everything depends upon how you bring them up.
    “But, as I was saying before my digression, this boy, ‘Boro,’ of Harper’s, was to come with us, and I did not like the look of him one little bit. He was a holy terror of uncleanness and carelessness.
    “We left the Gunyaligo with the rams, and I meant to cross the dividing range with them, straight to Fassifern, steering about north-north-east by the sun.
    “Mick Brady was my white man, a regular old stodger with cattle, slow, but sure and steady, well up to every wrinkle on the roads.
    “He had been with me for years. We made a creek the first night, and I camped the rams successfully by a big ‘waterhole’. Mick had his old one-eyed cattle dog, ‘Bally,’ with him, and I had ‘Joker,’ who had taken to me wonderfully. We had about fifty miles to make from this water-hole to Fassifern, and a long stage next day of fifteen miles. Next day proved to be very hot, and we made slow progress. At noon we let the sheep ‘camp’ as usual. I made sure of finding good water over the range at a place I knew of, or I never should have taken this route, but it was a straight track of my own from Belala to Fassifern.
    “I let the rams have a good rest and feed, intending to take them on to the water during the night if necessary.
    “‘Boro’ had our water on the packhorse, and I tell you both Mick and I needed a drink badly at mid-day. We had four big waterbags. The horses felt the heat too, and they just got a ‘washout’—a mouthful apiece. We started on again at about four o’clock in the afternoon, ten miles to go to water. We kept on ’til dark and camped