was stern and drawn. He looked at us from under his shaggy
brows.

"There's a Court to be opened," he said. "Do you stand for law or
justice?"

"For justice," we replied.

Four days later in a ravine at Budgery-Gar a big camp of blacks were
feasting. With loathsome pantomime they were re-enacting the murders
they had committed within the past few days; murders of innocent white
women and children, and good men and true--among them the Cadi, God help
him! Great fires were burning in the centre of the camp, and the bodies
of the black devils writhed with hideous colour in the glare. Effigies
of murdered whites were speared and mangled with brutal cries, and then
black women of the camp were brought out, and mockeries of unnameable
horrors were performed. Hell had emptied forth its carrion.

But twelve bitter white men looked down upon this scene from the scrub
and rocks above, and their teeth were set. Barlas, their leader, turned
to them and said: "This court is open. Are you ready?"

The click of twelve rifles was the reply.

When these twelve white jurymen rode away from the ravine there was
not one but believed that justice had been done by the High Court of
Budgery-Gar.

AN EPIC IN YELLOW

There was a culminating growth of irritation on board the Merrie
Monarch. The Captain was markedly fitful and, to a layman's eye,
unreliable at the helm; the Hon. Skye Terryer was smoking violently, and
the Newspaper Correspondent--representing an American syndicate--chewed
his cigar in silence.

"Yes," Gregson, the Member of Parliament, continued, "if I had my way
I'd muster every mob of Chinamen in Australia, I'd have one thundering
big roundup, and into the Pacific and the Indian Sea they'd go, to the
crack of a stock-whip or of something more convincing." The Hon. Skye
Terryer was in agreement with the Squatting Member in the principle
of his argument if not in the violence of his remedies. He was a young
travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty,
Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet
reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one
of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the
noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The
Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at
the beginning of the discussion showed that he was not antipathetic to
Mongolian immigrat