IT so happened that business called me to Queensland in the late October of 1894, and hearing that my old friend, Rosamund Dale, was about to be married, I determined to present myself at Jim Macdonald's station on the Barcoo District in December, in order to be present at the ceremony. I had seen a good deal of Rosamund when she was a child, and it was an old promise of mine that, if possible, I was to be one of the guests at her wedding.I arrived at Macdonald's a week before Christmas, and when a hot wind, or sirocco, was blowing in from the west. I little thought, as I did so, that the strangest, and most terrible adventure of my life was about to take place in the Queensland bush. But so it was, and this is the story just as it happened.