He went back to build a million dollar irrigation ditch for his little city on the frontier, and shortly afterward the newspapers reported that my friends--the Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers--attacked his bank, and shot the cashier. May civilization never shut out the free air of the frontier while the old hero lives, in peace and honor, loved to the end and worshiped by all real frontiersmen. XVII A. D. 1860 THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT I When the Eternal Father was making the earth, at one time He filled the sea with swimming dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land with hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a success, and so He swept them all away. After that he filled the southern continents with a small improved hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried the baby in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish, shadeless trees, and furry running birds like the emu and the moa. Then He swamped that southern world under the sea, and moved the workshop to our northern continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia just as they were, a scrap of the half-finished world with furry running birds, the hopping kangaroo, the shadeless trees, and half-invented fish. So when the English went to Australia it was not an ordinary voyage, but a journey backward through the ages, through goodness only knows how many millions of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such a strange land a man must be native born, bush raised, and cunning at that, on pain of death by famine. The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The laws were so bad in England that a fellow might be deported merely for giving cheek to a judge; and the convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape to the bush, and runaway convicts explored Australia mainly in search of food. One of them, in Tasmania, used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with him and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food and had to surrender. Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers drifted in, filling the country, but the miners and the farmers were too busy earning a living to do much exploration. So the exploring fell to English gentlemen, brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing of bushcraft and generally died of hunger or thirst in districts where the native-born colonial grows rich to-day.