That is the theater for the drama.  When you comprehend one or two other details, you will perceive how well suited for trouble it was, and how loudly it invited it.  The cattlemen’s stations were scattered over that profound wilderness miles and miles apart—­at each station half a dozen persons.  There was a plenty of cattle, the black natives were always ill-nourished and hungry.  The land belonged to them.  The whites had not bought it, and couldn’t buy it; for the tribes had no chiefs, nobody in authority, nobody competent to sell and convey; and the tribes themselves had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land.  The ousted owners were despised by the white interlopers, and this opinion was not hidden under a bushel.  More promising materials for a tragedy could not have been collated.  Let Mrs. Praed speak: 

“At Nie station, one dark night, the unsuspecting hut-keeper, having, as he believed, secured himself against assault, was lying wrapped in his blankets sleeping profoundly.  The Blacks crept stealthily down the chimney and battered in his skull while he slept.”

One could guess the whole drama from that little text.  The curtain was up.  It would not fall until the mastership of one party or the other was determined—­and permanently: 

“There was treachery on both sides.  The Blacks killed the Whites when they found them defenseless, and the Whites slew the Blacks in a wholesale and promiscuous fashion which offended against my childish sense of justice.

     “They were regarded as little above the level of brutes, and in some
     cases were destroyed like vermin.

“Here is an instance.  A squatter, whose station was surrounded by Blacks, whom he suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an attack, parleyed with them from his house-door.  He told them it was Christmas-time—­a time at which all men, black or white, feasted; that there were flour, sugar-plums, good things in plenty in the store, and that he would make for them such a pudding as they had never dreamed of—­a great pudding of which all might eat and be filled.  The Blacks listened and were lost.  The pudding was made and distributed.  Next morning there was howling in the camp, for it had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic!”

The white man’s spirit was right, but his method was wrong.  His spirit was the spirit which the civilized white has always exhibited toward the savage, but the use of poison was a departure from custom.  True, it was merely a technical departure, not a real one; still, it was a departure, and therefore a mistake, in my opinion.  It was better, kinder, swifter, and much more humane than a number of the methods which have been sanctified by custom, but that does not justify its employment.  That is,