Clair waited, motionless, until the last glimmer of day had faded from the sky. Then, without noise, without haste, he slithered down the steep bank to where the boats were moored, pulled out the iron spike at the end of one of the mooring chains, softly coiled the chain in the bow, got in, and silently swung out the oars. The operation was so noiseless that a fox, drinking on the opposite side, never raised its head.

The “sundowner”, for Clair at that time was carrying his swag with no intention of accepting work, sat facing the bow and propelled the boat forward by pushing at the oars. There was no suspicion of the sound of water being dug into by oars, nor was there any noise of moving oars in the row-locks. Boat and man slid upstream but a darker shadow in the gloom beneath the overhanging gums.

At the bend, half a mile above, a dozen ill-clad figures lounged about a small fire, not for warmth, but for the sake of spirit-defying light. Clair pushed on silently for a further two hundred yards, when he slanted across the stream and landed.

It is the law of New South Wales that no white man shall enter a camp of blacks. Of this Clair was not ignorant. Nor was he ignorant, being well read, that laws are made for men, and not men for laws.

Avoiding fallen branches and water gutters with the ease of a born bushman, he passed through the darkness to the camp, where he halted some twenty feet from the fire.

“Ahoy! Pontius Pilate!” he called.

Lolling figures about the fire sprang up, tense, frightened at the suddenness of the voice in the night.

“I want to speak to you, Pontius Pilate,” called Clair.

A grizzled, thick-set aboriginal stared suspiciously in Clair’s direction. He gave a low-spoken order, and three gins hastened to the seclusion of a bough-constructed humpy. Then, striking an attitude of indifference, Pontius Pilate said:

“You want-it talk me; come to fire.”