It's the same
every year--when the wild geese come the blacks have got to go,
and it's no use talkin'. So I was slavin' away here--out all day
on the run with the cattle--and one night I comes home after being
out three days, and there at the foot of the bunk was the two gins'
trousers and shirts, folded up; they'd run away with the others.
"So I goes after 'em down the river to the lagoons, and there was
hundreds of blacks; but these two beauties had heard me coming,
and was planted in the reeds, and the other blacks, of course, they
says, "No more" when I arst them. So there I was, lonely. Only me
and the Chinaman here for two months, 'cause his gin had gone too.
So one day I ketches the horses, and off I goes, and travels for
days, till I makes Pike's pub, and there was this woman.
"It seems from what I heard afterwards that she'd just cleared out
from some fellow she'd been livin' with for years--had a quarrel
with him. Anyhow, I hadn't seen a white woman for years, and she
was a fine lump of a woman, and I got on a bit of a spree for a
week or so, you know--half-tight all the time; and it seems some
sort of a parson--a mish'nary to the blacks--chanced along and
married us. She had her lines and everything all right, but I don't
remember much about it. So then I'm living with her for a bit; but
I don't like her goin's on, and I takes the whip to her once, and
she gets snake-headed to me, and takes up an axe; and then one
day comes a black from this place and he says to me, he says, "Old
man," he says, "Maggie and Lucy come back.
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