with the buggy whip -- and he didn't draw the colour line either.
All that night and next day I wished he had. I was sent home,
and Joe went droving with uncle soon after that, else I might have
lived a life of freedom and content and died out peacefully
with the last of my adopted tribe.

Joe died of consumption on the track. When he was dying uncle asked:
"Is there anything you would like?"

And Joe said: "I'd like a lilly drap o' rum, boss."

Which were his last words, for he drank the rum and died peacefully.

I was the first to hear the news at home, and, being still a youngster,
I ran to the house, crying "Oh, mother! aunt's Joe is dead!"

There were visitors at our place at the time, and, as the eldest child
of the maternal aunt in question had also been christened Joe
-- after a grandfather of our tribe (my tribe, not Black Joe's) --
the news caused a sudden and unpleasant sensation. But cross-examination
explained the mistake, and I retired to the rear of the pig-sty,
as was my custom when things went wrong, with another cause for grief.




They Wait on the Wharf in Black

"Seems to me that honest, hard-working men seem to accumulate
the heaviest swags of trouble in this world." -- Steelman.