h old Jimmy on horseback, and to notice the
look of blank amazement on his face when he found himself at fault
amongst the sandhills; the way he excused himself for not going
straight to this little spot was also very ingenuous. In the first
place he said, "Not mine young fellow now; not mine like em pony"--the
name for all horses at Fowler's Bay--"not mine see 'em Paring long
time, only when I am boy." Whereby he intended to imply that some
allowance must be made for his not going perfectly straight to the
place. However, we got there all right, although I found it to be
useless. When asked concerning the country to the north, he declared
it was Cockata; the country to the west was also Cockata, the dreaded
name of Cockata appearing to carry a nameless undefined horror with
it. The term of Cockata blacks is applied by the Fowler's Bay natives
to all other tribes of aboriginals in the country inland from the
coast, and it seems, although when Fowler's Bay country was first
settled by the whites these natives attacked and killed several of the
invaders, they always lived in terror of their enemies to the north,
and any atrocity that was committed by themselves, either cannibalism,
theft, or murder, was always put down to the account of the Cockatas.
Occasionally a mob of these wilder aboriginals would make a descent
upon the quieter coast-blacks, and after a fight would carry off women
and other spoils, such as opossum rugs, spears, shields,
coolamins--vessels of wood or bark, like small canoes, for carrying
water--and they usually killed several of the men of the conquered
race. After remaining at this Paring for about an hour, we remounted
our horses and returned to the camp at Youldeh. The party remained
there for a few days, hoping for a change in the weather, as the heat
was now very great and the country in the neighbourhood of the most
forbidding and formidable nature to penetrate. It consisted of very
high and scrubby red sandhills, and it was altogether so unpleasing a
locality that I abandoned the idea of pushing to the north, to
discover whether any other waters could be found in that direction,
for the present, and postponed the attempt until I should return to
this depot en route for Perth, with the whole of my new
expedition--deciding to make my way now to the eastwards in order to
reach Beltana by a route previously untravelled.

Upon the morning after my return from Paring, all the horses were
away--inde