en ridges and sandy plains, where
they starved and died off one by one, till he was alone--and his faith
was gone.

The creed and the faith he had learned and loved; the tribal lore and
the ordered rite; the lesson, the trial, and the test of strength--they
had all been wrong when the white man came. And now he was old and worn
and sad, there was one idea, one hope, he had--that before he died he
might wet his hands with the blood of the men who had spoiled his life.

As he sat blinking at the glow of his fire, just as he had sat for days
past, he heard a sudden commotion amongst the men who were lounging in
the shade, and, looking up, he saw four horsemen approaching through the
bush. The men had also seen them, and were going towards them to beg
tobacco. Some young gins stood by a gunyah, and he saw one of the
horsemen point to them, and turn and say something to his companions.
The sound of their voices came to him--and then he saw two of them ride
at the men till they scattered and fled, while the other two rode at the
gins.

The old man sat without a move or a sound through all the turmoil and
confusion; but when the men wandered back, hours afterwards, when the
sounds of the horses' hoofs were growing faint in the distance and the
sky was ruddy with the setting sun, they found him sitting by his fire,
with the clothes of the white race flung away, his old withered body
daubed with splodges of white clay, and with a mass of white clay
plastered on his head. He was slowly rocking himself to and fro, and
chanting, in a quavering voice, a weird and mournful song. Everywhere
else there was silence; no fires glowed by the gunyahs or anywhere, save
near where the old man sat, and neither woman nor child could be seen.

The ways of their fathers were little to the men, for the time that
should have been spent in teaching them the customs and the creed had
been spent in fleeing from the bullets of the white men and seeking
out-of-the-way barren spots where neither white men nor the white men's
stock were likely to penetrate; but they knew enough to understand the
signs of deep mourning the old man had assumed, and to recognize the
dirge as the wail for those who had fallen while defending their women.

As the men came nearer they came slower, till they crept up to the fire
where it smouldered, and sat round it, silent and uneasy, as the sun
sank out of sight and the moon came up, while the old man crooned his
dirge. T