Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/540

516 Sir Thomas Elder, and have been found admirably adapted to the arid regions of Australia. A camel-breeding establishment has been in existence at Beltana for nearly twenty years, and more than a thousand camels have been supplied from it for hauling stores and doing other work that is usually performed by oxen or horses. They are broken to harness or the saddle; they draw drays or light pleasure-wagons, singly, and teams of six or eight camels are harnessed to heavy wagons, which they easily pull through the sand together with a load of two or three tons. The belle of Beltana, the daughter of the superintendent of the station, has a camel which she rides with a side-saddle just as a belle of New York rides her favorite saddle-horse. All the later exploring expeditions have been equipped with camels, and it was for exploration that these animals were first brought here.

"About three years after the line was opened, the men at the Barrow Creek station, a thousand miles from Adelaide, were attacked by the blacks. A line-repairer and an operator, Mr. Stapleton, were mortally wounded, and two others seriously. As Mr. Stapleton lay dying, the news was flashed to Adelaide by the other operator. The doctor and Mrs. Stapleton were summoned to a room in the Adelaide office, where they listened to the click of the instrument, which told how the husband's life was ebbing away in the far distant desert.

"An instrument was brought to his bedside and placed under his hand. He received the doctor's message that his wound was fatal, received the farewell of his wife, then telegraphed her an eternal good-by, and as he finished it his fingers clutched the key, and in a moment he lay dead. I was one of the group that stood in the Adelaide office that day, and you can easily believe that the scene moved everybody to tears."

The youths easily did believe it, for their own eyes were moist as they heard the sad story. The gentleman paused for one, two, in fact for several minutes, with his head turned away, and then resumed:

"The success of the telegraph has emboldened us, and we are now building a railway along the same line, and hope to have it done within the next ten years. Four hundred miles are completed northward from Adelaide, and on the other side of the continent half that distance is in the hands of contractors. Camels are employed to carry supplies, material, and water to the men in advance of the end of the track, and the work is being pushed forward very much as your builders in America constructed the Central and Union Pacific railways across the great plains east of the Rocky Mountains, and between those mountains and the Sierra Nevada range."