Native etiquette demanded that, on seeing a man in his camp, they must stick their spears into the ground as a sign of peace, and then squat beside their weapons until invited to enter the camp. These fellows ignored etiquette. They continued to advance, albeit at a walking pace.

Bony took up the pistol, aimed with care and fired. The bullet raised a spurt of dust at the edge of the road to the left of the party. Another bullet raised a spurt of dust to the right. The men halted. Bony shouted, using the Worcair dialect:

“Whatd’youwant?”

There followed a conference at which the leader advised one thing and the majority another, resulting in the leader winning his point. He now advanced, leaving the others to retreat a little way and sit down facing the camp. The leader came without his weapons. Bony pretended to be gravely interested in his drawing on the canvas of the ground, the pistol lying beside his right boot. The Illprinka man came to squat on his heels twenty feet from Bony, and Bony continued with his artistic efforts for a full three minutes. Then he asked, casually:

“What do you in the Land of Burning Water, you men of the Illprinka?”

“We were hunting kangaroos, and so keen was the chase that we forgot we had passed out of our own land.”

From a similarity of several words with those of the Worcair dialect Bonaparte understood this statement. Without heat, he said:

“One needs to be clever to tell lies with success.”

The Illprinka man was ill-formed for an aborigine, but there was power in his wide brow, evil in his black eyes, deepset beneath the frontal bone.

“We saw the white man’s horse-car burning in the gully and came to look-see,” he said, sullenly. “We saw the burned man inside. We saw your tracks down there. We saw where you picked up something fallen from the white man’s horse-car. Yougivit that thing, eh?”