Page:The romance of Runnibede (IA romanceofrunnibe00rudd).pdf/69

if ever man was a guide, mentor and friend to anyone in this world, "Missa Guv-nor," as they called him, was to those blacks of Runnibede. But to Ted and me, for long enough, "King Henry of Curlew Lagoon," the Governor afterwards crowned him, and Combo and "Curricomb" and "The Captain" and all the rest of the tribe, with their nakedness, and their "war wounds" and sears, and high cheek bones and black eyes, and flat noses and thick matted hair, were just plain savages, who would knock us on the head as soon as look at us, and roast and eat us as they would a ‘possum. They appeared to us in our dreams, yabbering and brandishing spears and boomerangs and nulla nullas, and gave us nightmares, in the throes of which we would wake the whole house up, yelling blue murder, and shouting for father. Gad! it took Ted and me a long time to become reconciled to those barefooted, sleeky skinned barbarians of the Australian bush, and to take them to our tents as long lost uncles and cousins. But when we did, we too became fond of them.

Mother, too, took a human interest in the black gins. She even become more perfect, I fancy, than the Governer in speaking their dialect. And one day, I remember, she discovered, when one from the Dawson tribe wandered into the station, that different dialects were spoken, and that they might as well have tried to converse with each other in German.

But the day she and big Mary Rumble lured the three lubras, wives of Combo, Curricomb, and the "Captain," into the big house to show them what it was like, and to advance their ideas of civilised