could feel the light boat
lift under them. He looked round now and then, steering himself by some
means inscrutable to the others, who without him would have been lost on
this watery waste.
All at once George stopped rowing. "Listen!" he exclaimed.
There was a swishing sound as of some great body rushing swiftly through
the water near them. It ceased suddenly; then as suddenly sounded again.
"Sharks about," remarked George, in a matter-of-fact tone, rowing again
with the same long sweeping stroke as before.
Nellie did not stir. She was used to such incidents, evidently. But Ned
had never before been so close to the sea-tigers and felt a creepy
sensation. He would much rather, he thought, be thirty-five miles from
water with a lame horse than in the company of sharks on a dark wet night
in the middle of Sydney harbour.
"Are they dangerous?" he asked, with an attempt at being indifferent.
"I Suppose so," answered George, in a casual way. "If one of them
happened to strike the boat it might be unpleasant. But they're terrible
cowards."
"Are there many?"
"In the harbour? Oh, yes, it swarms with them. You see that light," and
George pointed to the left, where one of the lights had detached itself
from the rest and shone close at hand. "That's on a little island and in
the convict days hard cases were put on it--I think it was on that
island or one like it--and the sharks saw that none of them swam
ashore."
"They seem to have used those convicts pretty rough," remarked Ned.
"Rough's no name," said George after a few minutes. "It was as vile and
unholy a thing, that System, as anything they have in Russia. A friend of
mine has been working the thing up for years, and is going to start
writing it up soon. You must read it when it comes out. It'll make you
hate everything that has a brass button on. I tell you, this precious Law
of ours has something to answer for. It was awful, horrible, and it's not
all gone yet, as I know."
He rowed on for a space in silence.
"There's one story I think of, sometimes, rowing across here, and hearing
the sharks splash. At one place they used to feed the dead convicts to
the sharks so as to keep them swarming about, and once they flung one in
before he was dead."
Nellie gave a stifled exclamation. Ned was too horror-struck to answer;
above the clicking of the oars in the rowlocks he fancied he could hear
the swish of the savage sharks rushing through the water at th
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