Dr Hayne said, “Go carefully, Ashby, and only use the shovel. Ah, that’s a skull, give it to me.” The doctor shook the damp earth off the skull and wiped it all over with a handkerchief.

“This is a very fine skull!” he said, holding it out to the towns people standing round the grave, for about twenty more had joined us since Mr Ashby started to dig. The doctor said, “This man had a perfect set of teeth—none decayed—not even a crack in any. Of course, the missing tooth in the front jaw was knocked out when this man was a youth undergoing all the endurance tests of the Bora ceremonies to prove him fit to be a warrior.”

Mr Ashby was kept going handing the doctor human bones out of the grave. The doctor kept saying the names of these bones, but said nothing else about them until he got an arm bone.

“Ah, now! This is a fine exhibit! See, it was broken here, and a very bad break it was, too. And though there was no Gunnedah Hospital here then, there was, nevertheless, a clever surgeon doctor in the tribe who did his job excellently. It is a fine job to look at.”

Numbers of other bones were handed out of the grave to the doctor, but he never made any remark about any of them having been broken. Mr Ashby cleaned the narrow and shallow grave of all loose earth. Dr Hayne said to various men present, “It’s a strange thing there are no war weapons buried with such a great warrior chief.”

No one present at the graveside saw any war weapon taken from the grave. Dr Hayne remained at the graveside until Mr Ashby had scraped it clean of all loose earth, then he wrapped the skull and the broken arm in some sacking—told Mr Ashby to put all the other bones in a packing bag and tie up in a bundle and take them over to the Police Stable and leave in the forage store-room. Then to get a cross-cut saw and a good thick slab of wood from top to bottom of the old carved box tree stump, making a cut across the stump above the ground grass line to get the totems of the Warrior Chief, and the stone tomahawk carved into the stump. Then to fill in and flatten the old grave down again.

The doctor took the skull and broken arm away with him. The small gathering about the grave dispersed, leaving when Mr Ashby began to fill in the old grave. I went home by the stable-yard front gate and, seeing Bundaar the tracker outside the stable clean-sanding the stirrup irons, I went down to tell him about the digging up of the old grave. But Bundaar, who was generally very keen to hear any news, said, “Now, don’t tell me nothing—I won’t listen to you and won’t look at anything you got from that place.”

“Well,” I replied, “Mr Ashby is carrying most of the bones from that grave rolled up in sacking, and he is going to put them in the forage storeroom where you sleep. There he is now coming in the front gate!”