V. LOST MAGGIE.

Black fellows and old bushmen—and young bushmen too, for the matter of that—cannot make out how it is that “new chums” lose themselves in Australia. They can tell which way to go by the place of the sun, and the dip of the country, and all kinds of little things that new comers would not understand even if they noticed them; and so they laugh at new comers for getting lost. But for all their bumptious talk, people of “colonial experience” sometimes get lost in the bush, and are never heard of again, like ships that have gone down at sea without any surviving eye, except God’s, to see them sink.
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Sad stories are told about these poor lost people. Sometimes they disappear for ever, like rain-drops swallowed by the ocean; sometimes they are found wandering about mad; sometimes they are found starved to death; sometimes just dying. Sometimes a heap of picked and bleached bones is found, with nothing to tell the name of the person whose flesh has been torn or has rotted off them. Sometimes the name, and one or two sprawling, half-unintelligible words have been feebly scratched on the pannikin that rusts hard by.

You may fancy, then, how dreadfully frightened a mother in the bush is when her little child is missing. But, though some of the little strays are never recovered, a great many of them are wonderfully protected, and come upon at last. It is about a little girl that was lost in the bush that I am going to tell you.
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One morning I had ridden over to Wonga-Wonga, and was having lunch with Mr. Lawson and Sydney, when Mrs. Jones rushed into the room, crying as if her heart would break.

“Oh, master,” she sobbed out, “I can’t find my Maggie; an’ I’ve been seekin’ her an hour an’ more. Oh! it was you who persuaded Jones to come when you was over at home, an’ if you don’t find my Maggie, I shall do myself or some on ye a mischief, I feel sure I shall. Oh, oh, oh! my ’ead feels fit to burst!”

Mr. Lawson quieted the poor screaming woman, and, when he found that little Maggie was really lost, he had horses run up, and every man and boy about the station started in search of Mrs. Jones’s lost lamb.
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Little Maggie was a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, laughing, lisping little pet; but if she had been a crosspatch everybody would have looked for her just as carefully. Harry and Donald bounced out of the weather-board cottage that was used for a school-room, like pellets from a popgun, when they heard the news; and after them the tutor rushed to horse, though he wasn’t much of a rider. John Jones was fetched up from the paddock where he was ploughing, and when he heard that little Maggie was lost, he made a rush at a young horse that had only had the tacklings on once or twice, and would have got on it too, somehow, though he had been thrown over its head the next second, if the horsebreaker had not laid hold of him, and given him a leg up on to a horse fitter for his riding.

In the course of the day the news spread to the stations round about, and before nightfall the whole countryside was up hunting for poor little Maggie. The shepherds left their dogs to look after their flocks, if they had dogs, and their flocks to look after themselves if they hadn’t dogs, to scour the bush.
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Mrs. Lawson and her girls searched all round the head station as if they were looking for a pin. Even Miss Smith mastered her dread of the bush, and went quite a quarter of a mile away from the house, all by herself, as she afterwards related proudly, even into places where she couldn’t see the house, and where she was dreadfully afraid that a bushranger would carry her off, or a snake would bite her, or the little imported bull would run at his timorous countrywoman. As for poor Mrs. Jones, she kept on rushing out into the bush, determined to walk on until she dropped, and then rushing back, before she had walked a mile, to hear whether little Maggie, or any tidings of little Maggie, had been brought home.
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Some of those who had been hunting for the little girl gave up the hunt at the end of the first day; some went on hunting with fire-sticks during the night, and then went back to their work next morning very cross because nothing had come of their kindness, and also because—pity often makes people cross—they couldn’t help thinking of the poor father and mother, and of how they would feel if their little ones had “gone a-missing.” Others camped out when the sun had gone down on one day’s unsuccessful search, that they might be fresh to renew their search on the morrow. Harry and Donald were two of these. They had thoroughly fagged themselves out, poking here and poking there, and then riding, as if for a wager, to some place where one or other of them had fancied they might, perhaps, find some traces of poor little Maggie. They were too tired even to be hungry when they got off their horses, as the stars were coming out. They almost fell asleep as they took the saddles off their horses, and were soon snoring between the saddle-flaps they used for pillows.

When the boys woke next morning they were as hungry as fox-hunters, but what were they to do for a breakfast? Donald saw a grass tree, and remembered what he had seen the black fellows do with grass trees on his father’s station, which was farther up the country than Wonga-Wonga.
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“It looks as if it would come up easy,” said Donald; “let’s loosen the earth round it a bit though. Now then, Harry, lay hold, and pull with a will, as old Tom the sailor says.”

The two boys laid hold of the queer crooked stump, and pulled with such a will that presently flat they tumbled on their backs, with the grass tree between them. The root was rotten, and swarmed with fat grubs. They made a black fellow’s breakfast off these, and then they saddled their horses, and off they rode again.
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They had not gone far before they came upon King Dick-a-Dick, admiring himself at a water-hole. He was in full dress, and he seemed very proud of it, as he made a looking-glass of the water, and then tossed up his head again. His Majesty’s crown was a battered white hat, and he wore a pair of light-striped knee-breeches—that was all his dress. He had had the hat and the breeches given him at some of the stations near, and the settlers about there had given him a brass chain too, and a brass plate engraved—

“H.M. Dick-a-Dick,

King of the ’Possum Tribe,”

“H.M. DICK-A-DICK, KING OF THE POSSUM TRIBE.”
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with a ’possum engraved underneath. The ’possum was the crest, so to speak, of King Dick-a-Dick’s tribe. Now this was the tribe from which Harry and Donald had had such a narrow escape, and, therefore, they felt rather nervous when they saw King Dick-a-Dick standing by the water-hole with his spear in his hand. But his Majesty was anxious to conciliate. He was fond of tobacco and flour, and he and his people had run short of both since they had been on bad terms with the whites. So, as soon as he saw the boys rein in, he stuck his spear, point downwards, into the ground, and beckoned to them to come on, grinning as if the top of his head was coming off. That was his way of giving “a winning smile.” When he learnt what the boys’ business was, he chuckled greatly at the thought of white fellows trying to find any one in the bush without black trackers, and then proposed that he and the boys should share the credit of finding the little girl. He made sure that he could find her. The direction in which she had left the station was known, so Dick-a-Dick took the boys back to within about a mile and a half of home, and then began to beat about. He went down on his hands and knees, and put his nose to the ground like a dog. Presently he stopped at an ant-hill, peered about for a minute, and then jumped up, and cut a caper. The boys couldn’t make it out, but he had discovered the mark of a tiny little bare heel in a dent on the ant-hill. When he had once found Maggie’s track, he scarcely ever lost it. On he went, walking with his nose almost as low as his toes. He found out little stones that had been moved, and grass-blades that had been scarcely brushed by poor little Maggie’s bare feet. He found out too the blood that had come from a scratch in one of them, got by scrambling over a splintery log.
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“Dat where piccaninny lubra stop to drink,” said Dick-a-Dick, pointing to a “crab-hole”—the hole made by a bullock’s hoof—on whose side he could see the print of a chubby little brow. “Missy proud now, pick waratah,” said Dick-a-Dick soon afterwards, as he gathered up the still crimson leaves of the flower which the little girl had bruised and thrown down. “Now Missy ’fraid o’ debil-debil,” said Dick-a-Dick by-and-bye, when he came to a place in which the tracks, invisible to the boys’ eyes, were so bewilderingly visible to him on all sides that he did not know at first which to follow. He soon found the right one, however, and led the boys to a place in which he said the little girl must have slept.
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So they kept up the search until, after travelling for hours in a circuitous zigzag, they came upon poor little Maggie, not four miles from home, but on the opposite side of the station to that from which she had started, coiled up in a black, jagged, charred tree-stump, with bright-eyed, basking little lizards watching her. Of course, the lizards vanished as Dick-a-Dick and the boys drew near, but his sharp eyes had seen something peculiar in their bright ones. Poor little Maggie was sound asleep; her fat little face, and neck, and arms, and legs, were sadly scratched. In a scratched, podgy little hand she held a posy of withered wild flowers.
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When she woke and saw Dick-a-Dick, trying to look specially amiable, grinning down upon her, she shrieked out, “Mammy!” But when she saw the boys, she jumped up and ran to them, and hid her face between them, and clung to them with two little leech-like arms. They tried to explain to her that if it had not been for her “nas’y b’ack man” she might never have seen her “Mammy” again; and Dick-a-Dick grinned his broadest grin to propitiate her; but it was no use. She screamed whenever her eyes fell upon Dick-a-Dick. And yet, according to her own pretty little prattle, she had not been “much f’ightened in the thoods.” She had seen “nas’y b’ack ’igglin’ thin’s,” but “the kin’ yady”—whoever that might be—“thoodn’t ’et ’em bite me.”

Harry took Maggie on his horse, and cantered on in front, and Donald and Dick-a-Dick cantered behind on Flora M‘Ivor.

What a reception they had when they got to the station, for they were getting anxious there about the boys as well as the little! The head-station shepherds had come in with their sheep, and a good many of the people who had been searching for a couple of days had gathered at the station quite dispirited at their lack of luck. They all gave a great cheer when Cornstalk and the mare laid down their ears, and brought up their four riders at a steeple-chase gallop.
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When Mrs. Jones had almost squeezed the breath out of poor little Maggie, she tried to garotte Harry and Donald, and then hugged Dick-a-Dick; and John Jones seemed inclined to hug all three of them, too, when he had done his best to press the little life his wife had left in her out of little Maggie; and then Mrs. Jones went into hysterics, and John Jones ran indoors and hid his face in the bed-clothes, and blubbered for a quarter of an hour; and everybody thought the better of him because he blubbered.

Just wasn’t there a supper at Wonga-Wonga that night! And didn’t Dick-a-Dick tuck into it? And didn’t Harry and Donald, between them, eat nearly half as much as he did?