"Heard the missus had knocked up?" he gasped. "Well, I'm blowed! Talk of
surprise parties!" and the old black fellows looked on enjoying the
effect.
"Black fellow plenty savey," they said loftily, and Dan was almost
persuaded to a belief in debbel-debbels, until our return to the
homestead, when Jimmy's Nellie divulged the Court secret; then Dan
ejaculated another "Well, I'm blowed!" with the theory of second-sight
and thought-reading falling about his ears.
After a consultation across the river in long-drawn-out syllables, Jack
decided on a horse muster for the return trip - genuine this time - and
went on his way, after appointing to meet us at Knock-up camp next
evening. But our horses refusing to leave the deep green feed, we settled
down just where we were, beside the river, and formed a curious
camping-ground for ourselves, a small space hacked out and trampled down,
out of the dense rank grass that towered above and around us.
But this was to be a record trip for discomfort. Dan, on opening out the
tucker-bags, announced ruefully that our supply of meat had "turned on
us"; and as our jam-tin had "blown," we feared we were reduced to damper
only, until the Maluka unearthed a bottle of anchovy paste, falsely
labelled "Chicken and Ham." "Lot's wife," Dan called it, after "tackling
some as a relish."
Birds were everywhere about the lagoons - ducks, shags, great geese, and
pigmy geese, hovering and settling about them in screaming clouds; and
after dinner, deciding we might as well have a bit of game for supper,
we walked across the open salt-bush plain to the Big Red Lily. But
revolvers are hardly the thing for duck shooting, and the soft-nosed
bullets of the Maluka's rifle reducing an unfortunate duck to a tangled
mass of blood and feathers we were obliged to accept, willy-nilly, the
prospect of damper and "Lot's wife" for supper. But our hopes died hard,
and we sneaked about the gorgeous lagoons, revolvers in hand, for a good
hour, "larning a thing or two about the lagoons" from Dan as we sneaked.
The Red Lily lagoons lie away from the Roper, on either side of it,
wide-spreading and shallow - great sheets of water with tall reeds and
rushes about them, and glorious in flowering time with their immense
cup-shaped crimson blossoms clustering on long stalks above great
floating leaves - leaves nearly approaching three feet in diameter I
think; and everywhere about the leaves hover birds and along the margins
of the lagoons stalk countless waders, cranes, jabiroos, and oftentimes
douce native companions.
Being so shallow and wide-spreading, the lagoons would dry up early in
the "dry" were it not that the blacks are able to refill them at will
from the river; for here the Roper indulges in a third "duck-under," so
curious that with a few logs and sheets of bark the blacks can block the
way of its waters and overflow them into the lagoons thereby ensuring a
plentiful larder to hosts of wild fowl and, incidentally, to themselves.
