"Next morning, soon after sunrise, he, and Mr. Irvine, and Mr. Cunningham, and their stockman, all came riding up to the place. They left their horses in our paddock, and we went off on foot through the swamp, and over to the nearest point of the rocks. "We had all guns but me. Mr. Macknight and Mr. Irvine had rifles, Mr. Cunningham and the Dunmore stockman double-barrels. It was bad walking through the rocks, but after a mile or two I hit off their tracks by finding where they had dropped one or two little things they had stolen. The grass was so long and thick that they trod it down like as they were going through a wheat-field, so we could see how they had gone by that. "Well, after four or five miles terrible hard walking, we came in sight of the lake, and just on a little knob on the left-hand side, with a bit of flat under it, was the camp. I crept up, and could see them all sitting round their fires, and yarning away like old women, laughing away now and then. By George, thinks I, you'll be laughing on the wrong side of your mugs directly. "Well, I crept back and told the party, and we all began to sneak on them quietly, so as to be close on them before they had any notion of our being about, when Mr. Cunningham, who was a regular bull-dog for pluck, but awful careless and wild-like, trips over a big stone, tumbling down among the rocks, drops his gun, and then swears so as you could hear him a mile off. "All the dogs in the camp--they're the devil and all to smell out white men--starts a barkin'. The blacks jumps up, and, catching sight of the party, bolts away to the lake like a flock of wild duck. We gave 'em a volley, but it was a long shot, and our folks was rather much in a hurry. I didn't see no one tumble down. Anyway, between divin' in the lake, getting behind the big basalt boulders on the shore of the lake, and getting right away, when we got up the camp was bare of everything but an old blind lubra that sat there with a small child beside her, blinkin' with her old eyes, and grinnin' for all the world like one of the Injun idols I used to see in the squire's hall at home. Just as we got up, one fellow bolted out from behind a rock, and went off like a half-grown forester buck. Mr. Cunningham bangs away at him, and misses him; then flings down his gun, and chivies after him like a schoolboy. He had as much chance of catching him as a collie dog has of running down an emu.