k before the wedding she
and her mother and her two brothers were butchered by blacks whom they
had often befriended and fed. We knew what had turned Barlas's hair grey
and spoiled his life.

Drysdale took up the strain: "Yes, Cadi, you've got the true missionary
gospel, the kind of yabber they fire at each other over tea and buns at
Darling Point and Toorak--all about the poor native and the bad, bad men
who don't put peas in their guns, and do sometimes get an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.... Come here, Bimbi." Bimbi came.

"Yes, master," Bimbi said.

"You kill that black-fellow mother belonging to you?"

"Yes, master."

"Yes," Drysdale continued, "Bimbi went out with a police expedition
against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother's head off. As a
race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty. They will track their
own brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the
whites. As a race they are treacherous and vile, though as individuals
they may have good points."

"No, Cadi," once more added Barlas, "we can get along very well without
your consolidated statutes or High Courts or Low Courts just yet. They
are too slow. Leave the black devils to us. You can never prove anything
against them in a court of law. We've tried that. Tribal punishment is
the only proper thing for individual crime. That is what the nations
practise in the islands of the South Seas. A trader or a Government
official is killed. Then a man-of-war sweeps a native village out of
existence with Hotchkiss guns. Cadi, we like you; but we say to you, Go
back to your cultivation-paddock at Brisbane, and marry a wife and beget
children before the Lord, and feed on the Government, and let us work
out our own salvation. We'll preserve British justice and the statutes,
too. ... There, the damper, as Bimbi would say, is 'corbon budgery', and
your chop is done to a turn, Cadi. And now let's talk of something that
doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth."

The Cadi undoubtedly was more at home with reminiscences of nights
at the Queensland Club and moonlight picnics at lovely Humpy Bong and
champagne spreads in a Government launch than at dispensing law in
the Carpentaria district. And he had eager listeners. Drysdale's
open-mouthed, admiring "My word!" as he puffed his pipe, his back
against an ironbark tree, was most eloquent of long banishment from the
delights of the "cultivation-paddock"; and Barlas nodded frequ