, gained the
reedy slope safely. She staggered forward a few reeling hops, and then
fell to the earth like a dead creature. In an instant Dot was out of the
pouch and had her arm round the poor animal's neck, crying, as she saw
blood and foam oozing from her mouth, and a strange dim look in her sad
eyes. "Don't die, dear Kangaroo! Oh, please don't die!" cried Dot,
wringing her hands, and burying her face in the fur of the poor gasping
creature.

"Dot," panted the Kangaroo, "make a noise,--Cry loud!--not safe yet!"

The little girl didn't understand why the Kangaroo wanted her to make a
noise, and she had, in her fear and sorrow, quite forgotten their
pursuers. But now she turned, and could hear the Blacks urging on their
dogs as they were making an attempt to skirt round the precipice, and
gain the other side of the chasm. So Dot did as she was told, and
screamed and cried like the most naughty of children; and the gasping
Kangaroo told her to go on doing so.

[Illustration: A LEAP FOR LIFE]

Then what seemed to Dot a very terrifying thing happened; for she soon
heard other cries mingle with hers. From the desolate morass, and from
the gully in darkness below, came the sound of a bellowing. She stopped
crying and listened, and could hear those awesome voices all around, and
the echoes made them still more hobgoblinish. The Kangaroo's eyes
brightened, as she restrained her panting, and listened also. "Go on,"
she said, "we're safe now," so Dot made more crying, and her noises and
the others would have frightened anyone who had heard them in that
lonely place, with the wind storming in the trees, and the black clouds
flying over the moon. It frightened the Blackfellows directly.

They stopped in their headlong speed, shouting together in their shrill
voices, "The Bunyip! the Bunyip!" and they tumbled over one another in
their hurry to get away from a place haunted, as they thought, by that
wicked demon which they fear so much. At full speed they fled back to
their camp, with the sound of Dot's cries, and the mysterious bellowing
noise, following them on the breeze; and they never stopped running
until they regained the light of their camp fires. There they told the
"Gins," in awe-struck voices, how it had been no Kangaroo they had
hunted, but the "Bunyip," who had pretended to be one. And the Black
gins' eyes grew wider and wider, and they made strange noises and
exclamations, as they listened to the story of how the