turned, they picked up their whole portable array of wurleys (cone-shaped huts), and moved to within less than a mile of the sore spot in the wire!
Sam told Goelitz, and brought him to the scene. "I'm going to fix 'em next time!" the recruit announced. "Come back here and have a look at my own devil-devil. I only wish they'd start their damned bull-roarers now! I'd like you to be with me."
Goelitz frowned and followed. Like most Australians, he felt that the sooner the aborigines were exterminated, the better. But it was impossible to carry war to them.
Behind a covert of dwarf screwpines Sam Varney had concealed a ten-foot contraption of wood, canvas and paint. It was a toothy, menacing face outlined in red paint, a scarecrow whose outstretched arms could be made to flap the canvas sleeves up and down when a cord was pulled by the man carrying the whole thing. Childish, of course, but then these blacks were nothing but superstitious children.
"It might work—but then there probably would be fifty spears sticking through the middle of that nightgown," said Goelitz. "Better not risk it when you're alone, Sam. I need you."
They had no more than started back to the fence and their tethered camels, however, when a nasal, whining shriek brought them up standing. The first of the bull-roarers, the whirring handsirens which always signalled the banishment of the gins from the ceremonial circle of corroborree. Instantly a dozen more bull-roarers joined. The air quivered with that whining, nervejangling nastiness of sound.
"Reckon you got to see!" said Sam with grim satisfaction. "We've got an hour before the bucks come, but the gins 'll be down cutting wire in half that time. Le's hide the camels first."
When the sound died, the two fence men crouched down back of the screw pines. Already they could hear the far-off chattering voices of the gins. These women would come down and
Koala
do the first work. Then they would scatter when their lords and masters came.
The chattering grew to an ululating clamor of weird cries. The gins came running, scampering, leaping high in the air, turning, kicking their toothpick stilts of legs, brandishing whatever weapons or tools they had been able to gather.
They did not immediately attack the wire, but went through a seemingly endless and meaningless ceremonial capering on the far side. Sam watched intently. The conviction was growing in his mind that these raids were not for the purpose of securing wire, but for some superstitious or religious notion. Perhaps this particular spot where the wire always was cut was
