A score or so of unmarried young girls were dimly visible sitting or standing by the married people’s gunyah fires, gossiping until well after the last rebellious boy had been sent to sleep. Presently, yawning, the camp owners began banking up their little fires, scraping the ashes over them to hold in the heat of the coals. Thus one by one the gunyah fires began to go out, and as they did so the young women strolled back to their own gunyahs.

Some old women in garrulous gossip presently became heated, their angry, shrill accusations bringing subdued, reproving growls from the guards. The tirade died down, suddenly to break out afresh. Then two old women jumped up, their voices rising to a frenzy of accusations as viciously they began belabouring one another with their fighting sticks, edged on by their howling sisters. Two of the guards jumped up and running down to the fighters seized them by the necks and savagely bumped their heads together, throwing one into one gunyah, the other into the farthest gunyah. With angry warnings, the two guards came striding back to their fires.

As the night drew slowly on, so the camp quietened. It began to grow very late. Some of the guards began to come strolling to their separate fires, barely glowing coals. Yawning, each of these stuck a spear upright in the ground, sat down by his fire, rolled his possum rug round him, and lay down to sleep. Here and there a guard sat wrapped in a rug, staring into his little fire, while others slowly strolled between the fires across the entrance way to his dark camp, or strolled down as far as the women’s gunyahs to bank up a fire that was still glowing too brightly, or stood at the mouth-edge of the scrub leaning sleepily there, just a shadow only visible in the glow of some guard’s fire.

Slowly the night drew on. Very quiet now, growing chilly, then cold. Those dim guards still crouching over the dying coals of their fires wrapped their possum rugs tighter round them.

The Red Chief gripped Burradella’s arm; his fierce eyes could just see a shadow movement here and there out in front under the starlight.

“Some of the scouts are stealing back to their camp with the news,” he whispered, “while others remain to watch.”

Away back in the darkness within that narrow gap in the scrub a baby began to whimper, then cry and cry. The invisible mother must have crawled out of her gunyah, for a tiny flame flickered up away down there, showing the concerned face of young Naroo as, baby at breast, she made up the fire into a small glow, warming the baby at the fire, drawing her possum rug tightly round both herself and the crying baby. The outline of the young woman crooning over her baby could just be seen in the little fire glow she built up there in the black darkness.

Presently the baby ceased its crying. The enemy scouts were not to know that Naroo, so unwillingly, had been pinching it. The shadowy form of the young woman bent over the flame as she now smothered it with ashes before crawling back into her gunyah with the now sleeping baby. It had been perfectly done.