Anyhow she quailed before my eyes and dropped the spear, and I went my way. The blacks were at that time very bad in that district, spearing cattle, &c., and as I was going along the road I accounted to myself for their presence on the station in this way--that perhaps the squatter thought it cheaper to feed them than to allow them to rob him. That they were not very quiet blacks I felt sure, and the more I thought of the gin and her uplifted spear the more anxious I became. They might, thought I, set out after me yet and finish me off. Moreover, as I had thirty miles to walk before I could hope for any food, I made up my mind to stagger on as long as my feet could carry me. But I did not go so fast as the day before. Slowly and painfully did I drag along. The road was simply a track on which a horse might come along, and a sort of coarse grass eight or nine feet high grew on both sides. How fervently I wished I might meet another traveller--anybody had been welcome--but no one seemed to have been along there for ages. On I went. Every half mile or so I would come to a running brook crossing the road. I became too fatigued to take off my boots and socks every time, and this made my feet sore; but still I staggered on. It was now evening, or, rather, late at night, but just as the moon was going down I came to a creek which seemed larger than the rest, inasmuch that I could not in the darkness look across, and taking a couple of steps into the water I went in nearly to the middle; still it grew deeper. I therefore concluded that as necessity knows no law, I must camp and wait for daylight before I attempted crossing. A large tree was growing close to the water and on the track. Down by the roots of that tree I threw my swag, and laid myself upon it without undressing and without a fire. My matches were all wet, and I was too tired to walk one unnecessary step. I was lying there looking up at the stars, feeling so unspeakably tired, when, after a while, just as I was going to sleep, I heard a noise not far from me for which I could not account, but it brought me to speculate upon the probability that there were alligators in the water, and that it was scarcely prudent to lie there as I did, with my feet almost in the stream. So I got up and went back some twenty yards or so, on the rising ground, where there had been an old camp years before. There I lay myself down again with a big stick in my hand. I had just gone off to sleep when I started up again in terror. A peculiar indescribable noise was coming from down the creek, where I had been before. What it might be I did not know. Never had I heard the like before; it was a noise sufficient, as they say, to raise the dead.