That little incident might have changed the whole course of my existence.
Plar-bag Marmy made a formal complaint to uncle, who happened
to pass there on horseback about an hour later; and the same evening
Joe's latest and most carefully planned wood heap collapsed
while aunt was pulling a stick out of it in the dark, and it gave her
a bad scare, the results of which might have been serious.

So uncle gave us a thrashing, without the slightest regard
for racial distinctions, and sent us to bed without our suppers.

We sought Jimmie's camp, but Joe got neither sympathy nor damper
from his father, and I was sent home with a fatherly lecture
"for going alonga that fella," meaning Joe.

Joe and I discussed existence at a waterhole down the creek next afternoon,
over a billy of crawfish which we had boiled and a piece of gritty damper,
and decided to retire beyond the settled districts -- some five hundred
miles or so -- to a place that Joe said he knew of, where there were
lagoons and billabongs ten miles wide, alive with ducks and fish,
and black cockatoos and kangaroos and wombats, that only waited
to be knocked over with a stick.

I thought I might as well start and be a blackfellow at once, so we got
a rusty pan without a handle, and cooked about a pint of fat yellow oak-grubs;
and I was about to fall to when we were discovered, and the full weight
of combined family influence was brought to bear on the situation.
We had broken a new pair of shears digging out those grubs
from under the bark of the she-oaks, and had each taken a blade
as his own especial property, which we thought was the best thing to do
under the circumstances. Uncle wanted those shears badly, so he received us