Meanwhile, about the time Boobuk’s lazy men began snoring, just down from the Black Ridge Red Kangaroo and seven men were anxiously watching for signs of enemy scouts who would see the little campfires within the trap. But no enemy scouts came. Red Kangaroo hurried back to Burradella.

“They are so sure they have us deep within the scrub,” he said anxiously, “that they have hardly any scouts out. We must light a fire at the very mouth of the trap so that it must be seen—but only as if it is a fire that has flared up incautiously for a moment. Take three men along the Ridge until you can clearly see the enemy fires in Mullibah camp. Send a runner racing to me if the enemy see gleam of our fire from Mullibah. Then swiftly return.”

The Red Chief craftily lit his fire at the mouth of the Trap framed by the dense blackness of the scrub edge. Lit it, then threw on light tinder to make a needle flame shoot up, then quickly die down. From away down in the bush outside it would look exactly as if some child, told to poke the firesticks together, had in temper thrown on an armful of dried grass or kindling.

In a short time a runner came racing from Burradella.

“All the fires down in Mullibah Lagoon camp suddenly went out!” he said.

“They have seen it!” laughed the Red Chief. “Their scouts will be here soon. Quickly, carry this hot wood back to the guards’ fire. Dig a hole with your tomahawks, sweep the hot ashes into it. Be sure that not a hot stick or coal remains. Then stamp the dirt back flat and scatter loose grass over the dug-up ground. For when they come creeping in here, should a scout’s foot touch heat where a fire has been he would look round—they would grow suspicious at the last moment.”

He and Burradella then lay out from the edge of the scrub, anxiously waiting to see if that decoy fire would really bring the enemy scouts. Before them was the long strip of Open forest land growing neither shrub nor tree, the open ground upon which the wallabies used to feed. To spy well upon this supposed camp, enemy scouts coming up the bush-clad ridge would finally have to cross this open, starlit space.

Half an hour later the Red Chief exultantly nudged Burradella. From where they were lying they saw in silhouette the feather-bedecked head of a Cassilis scout rising up above the grass. It stayed as if balanced upon the night skyline, then his shadowy arm beckoned to someone behind him. Presently there were two dark heads peering across the open from away back there. Soon Burradella had counted fifteen as one would rise to creep forward, or drop to earth to stare and listen. Or a shadow-glimpse of head or back as they came crawling along over the short grass. Like dimly glimpsed, long black snakes they came silently squirming nearer and nearer the mouth of the Trap, away down in which they presently could see guards occasionally outlined by dim firelight, and back in the black scrub behind them the women’s fires that just illumined the gunyahs, women squatting before them, youngsters at play here and there. They saw, and heard small children laughingly chasing one another around the gunyahs, to be growled at occasionally by some cranky old woman. As night drew on, one woman after another called the boys to come to sleep. They were answered defiantly by the toddlers who had to be chased to their friends’ gunyah before being dragged back, whimpering or struggling, to the home gunyah to sleep.