There was no sound after the echoes of the shot had died away, a spluttering funeral knell.  Other natives, laying their spears aside, sprang from behind trees and rocks to the help of their fallen chief.  Nobody would harm them; the magic had ceased.  They raised him with the greatest solicitude, and bore him off.  His head hung on his breast; he could just stagger.

Faint from loss of blood, Sir George watched the serpent-like procession twine itself into the inner depths of the forest.  Having conquered; he had to console himself on the victory and bind up his own hurts.  These made him so weak that he must send to the camp for assistance, and he awaited its coming, a loaded gun on his knee.  The blacks assailed no more; instead, the birds sang in the sun, and he asked himself, ’Is it all a dream?’

‘Why,’ declared one of his men, helping him towards the camp, ’should you worry yourself over having shot that black fellow?  If you hadn’t, where should we all have been? and anyhow there are plenty more like him in the country.’  This comforter was himself to need comfort, by and by, on a less sombre subject.  He dashed in upon Sir George, crying, ’Sir, I have seen the Old Gentleman,’ and with his frame shaking as if he had.  It was the Australian bat on midnight circuit, a strange serenade to the European.  Another of nature’s creatures was to figure amid circumstances which did hold cause for terror.

‘It’s curious,’ Sir George mused, ’how we remember trifles of the long ago with preciseness, when often bigger events are blurred.  I recollect, very well, a slight incident of the scene on the island of Dorre, off the north-west coast of Australia, when a storm caught us.  In turn, I caught an old cormorant by the neck, and the bird was all we had for breakfast next morning.  A most sedate character he was, trying hard to maintain a dignified attitude in face of a very tempest of wind.  He wished to fly, but could not, the violence of the gale pinning him to the ground.  That was his death, which we all regretted; and I’m sorry to add that we were grudging enough to call him tough in the eating.’

This gale was preface to the great adventure of the second stage of Sir George Grey’s Australian explorations.  He was to have plenty of opportunity for the study of the Australian Aborigine, who, by and by, received him in better wise than at the point of a spear.  Somewhere, an old crone felt inspired to hug and kiss him, in the belief that he was her own dead son, spun white, and back on earth.  Having recruited from his earlier sufferings, he had gone by Perth, up the coast to Shark’s Bay in an American whaler.  He arranged to make a depot of Bernier Island, in the region of Shark’s Bay, and there, on a lovely day, he landed his stores, burying them for safety in the soil.  Up blew this storm, three nights later, when the explorers laid hands upon the solitary cormorant of Dorre.  Had they been on Bernier, instead, the spoil might have been a kangaroo, for it owned a special breed of that family.