e
camp by Leather, or he would have warned him of their presence.

"Would he?" thought Nic. "He's a disagreeable, surly fellow, and I
don't wonder, at Brookes bullying him so much. What shall I do?
Perhaps after all they're gone. Oh!"

That last was a low, deep expiration of the breath, for Nic was having
his first lesson in the clever cunning of the blackfellows. They were
not gone, but clustered together just on the other side of the
water-hole, some sixty yards away, right in sight as he peered between
the thick branches of the wattle.

Nic felt fascinated for the moment, and was ready to ask himself whether
it was real or a trick of his imagination. For there across the water
lay about and stuck up in all kinds of gnarled and grotesque shapes what
seemed to be a large clump of burned-down and blackened tree stumps;
broken branches sent off awkward snag-like pieces, others presented
bosses and excrescences; and but for the fact that he had seen the party
of blacks creeping up, Nic never could have imagined that they were
really there, thrown into these strange imitations of what was likely to
be found upon the bank of a water-hole.

But there they were, either acting their part to deceive the wild fowl
into coming near enough to be speared or knocked down, or trying to hide
themselves from the encamping party.

Yes, dim as the light was, there could be no deception, for Nic at last
made out the glint of an eye. It certainly was not a piece of gum
gleaming in the dewy morning, but the eye of one of the blacks. Then it
was gone.

What should he do? They were so clever that Nic knew it would be the
hardest of hard work for a white to beat them with their own weapons;
but the boy knew that he must act, and at once.

Dropping silently down, he lay on his breast thinking for a few moments,
making his plans.

It was quite three hundred yards to the tree where the fire had been
made--a long way for him to go if he were seen, for the naked blacks
would be swifter of foot than he. His only course was to crawl from
bush to bush; and feeling that for the present he was out of sight,
sheltered by the patch of wattle, he began to crawl slowly and as
silently as he could toward the waggon.

Nic had never before realised how difficult it was to proceed over wet
herbage after the fashion of a caterpillar. But this was the only way
for him to get along, and he did his best, moving slowly forward where a
savage wo