



Produced by David Widger





IN THE FAR NORTH

From "The Tapu Of Banderah and Other Stories"

By Louis Becke

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.

1901

               "Out on the wastes of the Never Never--
                    That's where the dead men lie!
               There where the heat-waves dance for ever--
                    That's where the dead men lie!"
                         (Barcroft Boake,
                         in the Sydney Bulletin.)




I

Jack Barrington, nominal owner of Tinandra Downs cattle station on the
Gilbert River in the far north of North Queensland, was riding slowly
over his run, when, as the fierce rays of a blazing sun, set in a sky of
brass, smote upon his head and shoulders and his labouring stock-horse
plodded wearily homewards over the spongy, sandy soil, the lines
of Barcroft Boake came to his mind, and, after he had repeated them
mentally, he cursed aloud.

"_That's where the dead men lie!_ Poor Boake must have thought of this
God-forsaken part of a