“Why afraid?” enquired Nellie, biting her lips.

“Because it has no chance,” answered Ned.  “These are all newspaper lies about them having arms and such nonsense.  There aren’t 500 guns in the whole Western country and half of them are old muzzle-loading shot guns.  The kangarooers have got good rifles but nineteen men out of twenty no more carry one than they carry a house.”

“But the papers say they’re getting them!”

“Where are they to get them from, supposing they want them and naturally the chaps want them when they hear of military coming to ’shoot ’em down’?  You can reckon that the Government isn’t letting any be carried on the railways and, even if they did I don’t believe you could buy 500 rifles in all Queensland at any one time.”

“Then it’s all make-up that’s in the papers?  It certainly seemed to me that there was something in it.”

“That’s just it, there is something in it.  Just enough, I’m convinced, to give the Government an excuse for doing what they did during the maritime strike without any excuse and what the squatters have been planning for them to do all along.”

“One of the Queensland men who was here a week or two ago was telling me about the maritime strike business.  It was the first I’d heard of that.  Griffith didn’t seem to be that way years ago,” said Nellie.

“Griffith is a fraud,” declared Ned, hotly.  “I’d sooner have one of the Pure Merinoes than Griffith.  They do fight us out straight and fair, anyway, and don’t cant much about knowing that things aren’t right, with Elementary Property Bills and ‘Wealth and Want’ and that sort of wordy tommy-rot.  I like to know where to find a man and that trick of Griffith at the maritime strike in Brisbane showed where to find him right enough.”

“Was it Griffith?” asked Nellie.

“Of course it was Griffith.  Who else would it be?  The fellows in Brisbane feel sore over it, I tell you.  When they’d been staying up nights and getting sick and preaching themselves hoarse, talking law and order to the chaps on strike and rounding on every man who even boo’d as though he were a blackleg, and when the streets were quieter with thousands of rough fellows about than they were ordinary times, those shop-keepers and wool-dealers and commission agents went off their heads and got the Government to swear in ‘specials’ and order out mounted troopers and serve out ball cartridges.  And all the time the police said it wasn’t necessary, that the men on strike were perfectly orderly.  Who’d ever do that but Griffith?  And what can we expect from a government that did such a thing?”

“The Brisbane men do seem sore over that,” agreed Nellie.  “The man who told me vowed it would be a long time before he’d do policeman’s work again.  He said that for him Government might keep its own order and see how soon it got tired of it.”

“Well, it’s the same thing going on now.  I mean the Government and the squatters fixing up this military business between them just to dishearten our fellows.  Besides, they’ve got it into their heads, somehow, that most men are only unionists through fear and that if they’re sure of ‘protection’ they’ll blackleg in thousands.”