Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/104

96 brains out against them. The sealer instinctively raised his piece for a shot at the murderer, bat remembringremembering [sic] his promise not to fire on anyone, and that his own safety depended on his keeping his word, the man escaped for the present. But Tucker marked him. It was Murray.

The wind blew off the land when he commenced his dreary night's voyage homewards, and he steered for the islands under a mizen only, the boat's mainsail and jib, of which his tent was made, being left with the natives. The breeze, however, was fresh and fair, and he kept before it all night, and when morning broke was off Preservation Island, on which he soon afterwards landed.

From this time forward Tucker's whole nature seemed changed. He was perhaps never a good man, but he was not a cruel one. But the loss of his mates, and the dangers he had so lately escaped from, gave rapid expansion to whatever evil there was within him, the latent seeds of which, like the prophets gourd, grew into maturity in a single night, but unlike it withered not away again. He was, moreover, as we have seen, fond of children, and the horrid death of one he had charge of only yesterday, gave intensity to a passion for revenge which now began to dominate over his reason.

Several other sealers to whom he was known were staying on Preservation Island, and to them he told the disastrous story of the death of his mates, and easily engaged them to assist in avenging it; and so as soon as the wind served, they sailed for Cape Portland, well armed and equipped for a murderous fight with the blackfellows.

Cape Portland is more properly a point of land than a cape. The shore hereabouts is almost everywhere low, and presents many points where a landing may be made in moderate weather. The country about it is not a fertile one, the best of it that I now remember, are a few hundred acres, in the midst of which it is that the pleasant homestead of Mr. John Foster, of Hobart Town, is planted. It was not far from here that the sealers landed, forming a temporary camp of their sails. But the wandering tribe had left the neighbourhood for other hunting grounds by this time, and their search after them, though it broke best part of a week, was an unavailing one, and they returned to the islands.

But Tucker never afterwards relinquished the idea of taking a full revenge on the Cape Portland tribe, wherever he might fall in with it; and above all, to destroy, if possible, the two youths, Jack and Murray. He made no secret of his intentions, and all the sealing community knew them; and as the sympathies