the ox-wagon entered the jurisdiction of Inspector Harris, and remained there for the next three hundred miles. After that dreary nine-day part of the journey was finished, traveling from dawn to dark of the summer days, they entered the three-length demesne of Inspector Burke. Claire's father was the next inspector to the north.
At the midway point of Burke's lengths, McManus the bullockie would turn back from the center of Australia and make his slow way back down the fence, gathering rabbit skins in bales and taking outgoing mail. One of the returning ox-wagons from the north would take Claire and the other two women the rest of the way home.
That was the plan, but it did not work out that way. Occasionally at sunset they heard a far-away whispering murmur of sound. It made the camels uneasy. Claire looked a little frightened, but said nothing to Elinor. These were the war drums of the aborigines.
The day before they reached the central well of Burke's sections—three hundred miles from home—the drums came nearer, and could not be blinked. McManus swore softly to himself, and Elinor asked wondering questions.
Up here the cameleers rode in pairs for protection. Several of them had been killed. There had been trouble three months earlier, but now it had returned with much greater seriousness. Afghan couriers came on swift meharis, but they spoke in gutturals only to the bullockie. Sara Peabody knew the signs, but she spent her time sitting straight and stiff. Her lips moved as she muttered prayers. Her refuge from everything was religion.
McManus went to Claire finally. "I'm worried, Ma'am," he said in a gruff undertone. "I wish you'd turn right about an' come back with me. Thim black Kimberley divvils from the northwest have been raidin'. The Parrabarras an' Aruntas ain't so bad, but the sivinfut Kimberleys! Tch! Then 'tis said the Parrabarras took a couple Kimberleys captive, an' ate 'em. That don't help none to speak of."
"Oh!" cried Claire, paling. Cannibalism, she knew, was impossible to suppress completely, but here it probably meant a long drawn out war between these two nomadic tribes, with white men suffering from the violence of both.
Something happened, however, to relieve McManus of responsibility, and make the remainder of the journey seem perfectly safe for the three women. A big stagecoach loaded with Government surveyors, and bristling with the barrels of ready rifles, caught up with McManus.
In the palaver that ensued, it developed that the surveyors would be only too glad to crowd together, some climbing to the top, in order to make room for three women—two of them young and pretty. Thus several days would be cut from the journey, and there would be plenty of defenders in case of attack. So it seemed.
Claire, Elinor and Sara Peabody made the change gladly. They learned the disturbing fact that the Government, valuing the line of protective fence more just at this time than it valued the completion of railway survey, had ordered every available man over to help defend the Smith and Doremus sections—Doremus being inspector of the northernmost division. It was thought that Paxton Trenholm had been stirring up the black nomads to war between themselves, and also
