for Sax, hoping that Sergeant Scott would be
able to send out a rescue party at once. But, as we have seen, the
trooper was away from home and nobody knew when he would be back again.

The camp where the drover was obliged to live consisted of thirty or
forty wurlies on the side of a little hill above a spring. The
dwellings were temporary and primitive, as blacks' dwellings are:
branches stuck into the ground and drawn together at the top to make a
shape like an inverted bowl. Stobart could have had one of these, but
as the former occupant had not left it as clean as a white man likes
his home to be, he chose a small cave a few yards above the camp. This
gave him the considerable advantage of being away from the dogs and
smell which are inseparable from a blacks' camp.

A bushmen always makes the best of a bad job, and Stobart did not see
why he should not have as good a time as he possibly could while
waiting for the chance to escape. He never for one moment doubted that
his adventure would end successfully, and his chief sorrow was for the
loss of the cattle. In the thirty years during which he had driven
stock from one end of Central Australia to the other, he had never had
one real disaster. Of course there had been small losses, sometimes
because of drought, once by flood, and once also because of a band of
marauding blacks which he had succeeded in driving off before they had
done much damage; but he had never failed to deliver his charges at
their destination better in condition and in greater numbers than could
be expected under the circumstances. It speaks well for the man's
stern sense of duty that, though he was a captive in a camp of the
wildest savages in Australia, and liable to death at any time, he
worried, not about his own safety, but about the lost cattle.

He became proficient with both boomerang and spear, and could soon
knock over a rock wallaby or a cockatoo as neatly as any man in the
tribe, and, because of his greater strength, he was more than a match
for the natives at any kind of sport. He had been a good tracker for
many years, but he now found that he had much to learn from these
natives, who for generation after generation had hunted for their food
by tracking it. Sometimes he was away from camp for days together with
a hunting expedition, and in this way he became perfectly familiar with
the lay of the country. By his constant association with the
warraguls, he picked up a g