The sleeping figures sprang up, the possum-rug bundles of grass and sticks were dragged from their hiding-places and cunningly arranged round the dying fires just as the sleepers’ bodies had been. Those two guards leaning sleepily against the opposite trees at the mouth of the Trap replaced themselves with a log draped in a possum rug, looking for all the world like a shadowy man leaning sleeping against the scrub edge.

Burradella, with a few warriors and boys, hurried straight down the Trap to the women’s gunyahs.

“Quick!” he whispered. “And go quietly. Don’t let a baby whimper now whatever you do! Take the children and yourselves straight into the scrub, deep in. Start to make your way back to the Secret Camp if you can manage it. These two boys will be guides, and these two will stay with the old women and help them along. Be deep within the scrub before dawn, out of our hearing. If any of you cannot manage it then remain still as death until you hear the fighting. Then go for your lives. Now go!”

Invisible as the darkness, with an unbelievable quietness those seventy women and all the children vanished into that dense black scrub.

Down toward the mouth of the Trap the Red Chief took his stand with his sixteen warriors spread out to either side of him, armed boys motionless between them. Facing him across the blackness of the other side waited Burradella with his seventeen men and the boys. Only thirty-five grown warriors all told. Two old warriors with a thin line of the older boys faced towards them at the narrow end of the Trap.

A deathlike silence now, oppressive smell of dank vegetation, cloying touch of drifting dew. Nothing to see but the blackness, except the dull embers of the “sleeping” guards’ fires well down within the mouth of this cutting in the scrub.

The enemy came silently, just before the first chill greying of the dawn.

The Red Chief’s men pushed noiselessly back against the undergrowth, and waited. With the first cold light the enemy sent their scouts creeping in. Satisfied by the still shapes of guards sleeping by the coals they crept back. Only then did the enemy come creeping to the very mouth of the Trap. They waited then until those little scrub birds that always begin their sleepy chatter with the first clear, grey light of dawn, began their chirruping. The Cassilis warriors leapt up with spears ready fitted to wommeras. Their shadowy forms seemed to stretch back, then lurch forward as one as they hurled a volley of spears full at the dim shapes of the sleeping guards. Then the scrub howled to the Cassilis war-cry as they leapt into the kill with the club.

The Red Chief’s men stepped forward clear of the scrub, spears ready fitted. At close range they hurled their spears into the black mass of enemy smashing down with clubs at the forms of the supposed guards.