Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/89

Rh with them and thus effecting the conciliation of the two races which it professed or pretended to aim at, which was something like trying to patch up the long established quarrel between the cats and dogs.

On reaching the boatmen's tent, he enquired of the blacks (some of whom of nearly every tribe spoke our language as Robinson was constantly discovering) if there were many others about? to which one of them, holding up all his fingers replied in passable English, "good many more," (evidence). "Captain Thomas," continues the witness, "asked them to take him to them, which they readily agreed to do," in other words the savages were only too happy to separate him from his party and get him into the bush. Thomas now dismounted from his horse to accompany them; but here Parker, who had none of the fine feelings, as they are called, of his employer, and no good opinion of the natives strove hard to dissuade him from engaging in so rash an enterprise as the one he was going on, saying to him—"Surely, Captain Thomas, you are never going to trust yourself with those blackguards, who'll kill you directly they are out of our hearing"; but the infatuated settler was not to be persuaded out of his belief of the harmlessness of their nature, and merely replied, "Oh, they are not so bad as they are represented, I am not afraid, and will go by myself." Parker stood amazed at the indiscretion of the other, but mistrustful as he was of the natives himself, the noble-minded fellow, after a moment's thought would not suffer him to go alone, so springing from his horse and shouldering his double-barrel gun, he strode after him. Parker was a very robust young man, a little over thirty and possessed of wonderful resolution, and he had no doubt, armed as he was, of being able to protect his employer against half a dozen of them if they came to blows; but the poor fellow had no idea of the artifice inherent in the savage, and in this one particular they were an overmatch for him.

Before following Thomas, he gave a few hasty directions to the bullock drivers, not to start until they returned, which he hoped would not be long first; and on parting from them—as it proved for ever—he ordered them not on any account to let their horses get astray, as they should want them directly they came back.

As Thomas and himself proceeded towards the camp of the blacks, their two or three attendants were, as if by pre-arrangement, soon reinforced by others; one fellow meeting them here, another a little further on, and a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, somewhere else, until they grew like Falstaff's recruits into a large but most disreputable looking troop, of whom the majority