Dan welcomed the spectacle as an “impromptu bit of education.  Learnt something meself, even,” he said with lordly superiority.  “Been out-bush forty years and never struck that before “; and later, as we returned to camp, he declared it “just knocked spots off De Rougemont.”

But it had taken so long to persuade the horses that a drink could proceed out of a mixing dish, that it was time to turn in by then; and Dan proceeded to clear a space for a sleeping ground with a tomahawk.  “Seems no end to education once you start,” he chuckled, hacking at a stubborn tussock.  “Reckon no other woman ever learned to make a bed with a tomahawk.”  Then Sambo created a diversion by asking for the loan of a revolver before taking a message to the blacks’ camp.

“Big mob bad fellow black fellow sit down longa island,” he explained; and Dan, whimsical under all circumstances, “noticed the surprise party wasn’t exactly going off without a hitch.”  “Couldn’t have fixed up better for them if they’ve got a surprise party of their own up their sleeves,” he added ruefully, looking round at the dense wall of grass about us; and as he and the Maluka swung the two nets not six feet apart, we were all of one mind that “getting murdered was an experience we could do nicely without.”  Then Sambo returning and swinging his net in the narrow space between the two others, set Dan chuckling again.  “Doesn’t mean to make a target of himself,” he said; but his chuckle died out when Sambo, preparing to curl up in the safest place in the camp, explained his presumption tersely by announcing that “Monkey sit down longa camp.”  Monkey was a law unto himself, and a very unpleasant law, being a reputed murderer several times over, and when he and his followers were about, white men saw to their rifles; and as we turned in we also agreed “that this wasn’t exactly the kind of nigger hunt we had set out for.”  “It makes a difference when the other chap’s doing the hunting, Sool’em, old girl,” Dan added, cautioning her to keep her “weather eye open,” as he saw to his rifle and laid it, muzzle outwards, in his net.  Then, as we settled down for the night with revolvers and rifle at hand, and Brown at the head of our net, he “hoped” the missus would not “go getting nightmare, and make things unpleasant by shooting round promiscuous like,” and having by this tucked himself in to his satisfaction, he lay down, “reckoning this ought to just about finish off her education, if she doesn’t get finished off herself by niggers before morning.”

A cheerful nightcap; but such was our faith in Sool’em and Brown as danger signals, that the camp was asleep in a few minutes.  Perhaps also because nigger alarms were by no means the exception:  the bush-folk would get little sleep if they lay awake whenever they were camped near doubtful company.  We sleep wherever we are, for it is easy to grow accustomed even to nigger alarms, and beside, the bush-folk know that when a man has clean hands and heart he has little to fear from even his “bad fellow black fellows.”  But the Red Lilies were beyond our boundaries, and Monkey was a notorious exception, and shrill cries approaching the camp at dawn brought us all to our elbows, to find only the flying foxes returning to the pine forest, fanning inwards this time.