When Clair entered the firelight the grizzled one and a youth of nineteen or twenty regarded him with unfriendly eyes. After a swift appraising glance, Clair sat on his heels before the fire and casually cut chips off a tobacco-plug for a smoke. The two aborigines watched him, and when he did not speak they edged close and squatted opposite the law-defying guest.

“Have a smoke?” said Clair, in a tone that held command. The elderly black caught the tossed plug, bit a piece out of it and handed it to his companion. The young man wore nothing but a pair of moleskin trousers; the elder nothing but a blue shirt.

“Only got one suit between you,” observed Clair unsmilingly. “Well, I reckon you can’t get sunburnt, sowhat’s the odds? You fellers belong to this part?”

“We come up from Wilcannialas ’ week,”came the literally chewed response. “Where you camped, boss?”

“Up river a bit. Is old Mokie down river, anyway?”

“Yaas-old Mokie, he married Sarah Wanting. You bin know Sarah?”

“I reckon so. Sarah must be getting old,” Clair replied, though as a matter of fact he had no idea to which of the manySarahs Pontius Pilate referred. Blacks marry and get divorced with a facility somewhat bewildering to the white mind. “I come down from Dunlop,” he went on. “Ted Rogers breaking-in horses up there.”

“He’s still there?” was the young man’s first speech.

“I think,”said Clair dreamily, “that I said it.”

The conversation was carried on disjointedly, punctuated by meditative smoking and tobacco-chewing. Then Clair put the question he had asked at countless camps in the course of many wandering years. No one present, not even the suspicious gossiping blacks, would have thought that his visit was solely for the purpose of asking this question:

“I knew anabo once, a terrible good horseman, feller called Prince Henry-no, not Prince Henry, some other name-tall big feller, old feller now. You know anabo called Prince Henry?”