A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Golden Shanty (1929)
Author:     Edward Dyson
eBook No.:  0500981.txt
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          October 2005
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Title:      The Golden Shanty (1929)
Author:     Edward Dyson






CONTENTS

A GOLDEN SHANTY
A VISIT TO SCRUBBY GULLY
AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD PIONEER
AT THE YARDS
A SABBATH MORN AT WADDY
THE TRUCKER'S DREAM
HEBE OF GRASSTREE
THE CONQUERING BUSH
A ZEALOT IN LABOUR
THE ELOPEMENT OF MRS PETERS
DEAD MAN'S LODE
A VAIN SACRIFICE
AFTER THE ACCIDENT
BENNO'S LITTLE BOSHTER
A HOT DAY AT SPAT'S
THE WOOING OF MINNIE
THE PACKER'S "LITTLE SILLY"
A SATURDAY AT SPAT'S
THE FICKLE DOLLY HOPGOOD
AT A BOXING BOUT
SUSIE GANNON'S YOUNG MAN
THE RIVALS
THE MAN-EATER
A QUESTION OF PROPRIETY
THE HAUNTED CORNER
A LITTLE LOVE AFFAIR
THE MORBID BOY
THE TOUCHER





A GOLDEN SHANTY

ABOUT ten years ago, not a day's tramp from Ballarat, set well back from
a dusty track that started nowhere in particular and had no destination
worth mentioning, stood the Shamrock Hotel. It was a low, rambling,
disjointed structure, and bore strong evidence of having been designed by
an amateur artist in a moment of vinous frenzy. It reached out in several
well-defined angles, and had a lean-to building stuck on here and there;
numerous outhouses were dropped down about it promiscuously; its walls
were propped up in places with logs, and its moss-covered shingle roof,
bowed down with the weight of years and a great accumulation of stones,
hoop-iron, jam-tins, broken glassware, and dried 'possum skins, bulged
threateningly, on the verge of utter collapse. The Shamrock was built of
sun-dried bricks, of an unhealthy, bilious tint. Its dirty, shattered
windows were plugged in places with old hats and discarded female
apparel, and draped with green blinds, many of which had broken their
moorings, and hung despondently by one corner. Groups of ungainly fowls
coursed the succulent grasshopper before the bar door; a moody,
distempered goat rubbed her ribs against a shattered trough roughly hewn
from the butt of a tree, and a matronly old sow of spare proportions
wallowed complacently in the dust of the road, surrounded by her
squealing brood.

A battered sign hung out over the door of the Shamrock, informing people
that Michael Doyle was licensed to sell fermented and spirituous liquors,
and that good accommodation could be afforded to both man and beast at
the lowest current rates. But that sign was most unreliable; the man who
applied to be accommodated with anything beyond ardent beverages--liquors
so fiery that they "bit all the way down"--evoked the astonishment of the
proprietor. Bed and board were quite out of the province of the Shamrock.
There was, in fact, only one couch professedly at the disposal of the
weary wayfarer, and this, according to the statement of the few persons
who had ever ventured to try it, seemed stuffed with old boots and
stubble; it was located immediately beneath a hen-roost, which was the
resting-place of a maternal fowl, addicted on occasion to nursing her
chickens upon the tired sleeper's chest. The "turnover" at the Shamrock
was not at all extensive, for, saving an occasional agricultural labourer
who came from "beyant"--which was the versatile host's way of designating
any part within a radius of five miles--to revel in an occasional
"spree," the trade was confined to the passing "cockatoo" farmer, who
invariably arrived on a bony, drooping prad, took a drink, and shuffled
away amid clouds of dust.

The only other dwellings within sight of the Shamrock were a cluster of
frail, ramshackle huts, compiled of slabs, scraps of matting, zinc, and
gunny-bag. These were the habitations of a colony of squalid, gibbering
Chinese fossickers, who herded together like hogs in a crowded pen, as if
they had been restricted to that spot on pain of death, or its
equivalent, a washing.

About a quarter of a mile behind the Shamrock ran, or rather crawled, the
sluggish waters of the Yellow Creek. Once upon a time, when the Shamrock
was first built, the creek was a beautiful limpid rivulet, running
between verdant banks; but an enterprising prospector wandering that way,
and liking the indications, put down a shaft, and bottomed on "the wash"
at twenty feet, getting half an ounce to the dish. A rush set in, and
within twelve months the banks of the creek, for a distance of two miles,
were denuded of their timber, torn up, and covered with unsightly heaps.
The creek had been diverted from its natural course half a dozen times,
and hundreds of diggers, like busy ants, delved into the earth and
covered its surface with red, white, and yellow tips. Then the miners
left almost as suddenly as they had come; the Shamrock, which had
resounded with wild revelry, became as silent as a morgue, and desolation
brooded on the face of the country. When Mr. Michael Doyle, whose
greatest ambition in life had been to become lord of a "pub.," invested
in that lucrative country property, saplings were growing between the
deserted holes of the diggings, and agriculture had superseded the mining
industry in those parts.

Landlord Doyle was of Irish extraction; his stock was so old that
everybody had forgotten where and when it originated, but Mickey was not
proud--he assumed no unnecessary style, and his personal appearance would
not have led you to infer that there had been a king in his family, and
that his paternal progenitor had killed a landlord "wanst." Mickey was a
small, scraggy man, with a mop of grizzled hair and a little red,
humorous face, ever bristling with auburn stubble. His trousers were the
most striking things about him; they were built on the premises, and
always contained enough stuff to make him a full suit and a winter
overcoat. Mrs. Doyle manufactured those pants after plans and
specifications of her own designing, and was mighty proud when Michael
would yank them up into his armpits, and amble round, peering about
discontentedly over the waistband. "They wus th' great savin in weskits,"
she said.

Of late years it had taken all Mr. Doyle's ingenuity to make ends meet.
The tribe of dirty, unkempt urchins who swarmed about the place "took a
power of feedin'," and Mrs. D. herself was "th' big ater." "Ye do be
atin' twinty-four hours a day," her lord was wont to remark, "and thin
yez must get up av noights for more. Whin ye'r not atin' ye'r munchin' a
schnack, bad cess t'ye."

In order to provide the provender for his unreasonably hungry family,
Mickey had been compelled to supplement his takings as a Boniface by
acting alternately as fossicker, charcoal-burner, and "wood-jamber;" but
it came "terrible hard" on the little man, who waxed thinner and thinner,
and sank deeper into his trousers every year. Then, to augment his
troubles, came that pestiferous heathen, the teetotal Chinee. One hot
summer's day he arrived in numbers, like a plague, armed with picks,
shovels, dishes, cradles, and tubs, and with a clatter of tools and a
babble of grotesque gibberish, camped by the creek and refused to go away
again. The awesome solitude of the abandoned diggings was ruthlessly
broken. The deserted field, with its white mounds and decaying
windlass-stands fallen aslant, which had lain like a long-for-gotten
cemetery buried in primeval forest, was now desecrated by the hand of the
Mongol, and the sound of his weird, Oriental oaths. The Chows swarmed
over the spot, tearing open old sores, shovelling old tips, sluicing old
tailings, digging, cradling, puddling, ferreting, into every nook and
cranny.

Mr. Doyle observed the foreign invasion with mingled feelings of
righteous anger and pained solicitude. He had found fossicking by the
creek very handy to fall back upon when the wood-jambing trade was not
brisk; but now that industry was ruined by Chinese competition, and
Michael could only find relief in deep and earnest profanity.

With the pagan influx began the mysterious disappearance of small
valuables from the premises of Michael Doyle, licensed victualler.
Sedate, fluffy old hens, hitherto noted for their strict propriety and
regular hours, would leave the place at dead of night, and return from
their nocturnal rambles never more; stay-at-home sucking-pigs, which had
erstwhile absolutely refused to be driven from the door, corrupted by the
new evil, absented themselves suddenly from the precincts of the
Shamrock, taking with them cooking utensils and various other articles of
small value, and ever afterwards their fate became a matter for
speculation. At last a favourite young porker went, whereupon its lord
and master, resolved to prosecute inquiries, bounced into the Mongolian
camp, and, without any unnecessary preamble, opened the debate.

"Look here, now," he observed, shaking his fist at the group, and
bristling fiercely, "which av ye dhirty haythen furriners cum up to me
house lasht noight and shtole me pig Nancy? Which av ye is it, so't I kin
bate him! ye thavin' hathins?"

The placid Orientals surveyed Mr. Doyle coolly, and innocently smiling,
said, "No savee;" then bandied jests at his expense in their native
tongue, and laughed the little man to scorn. Incensed by the evident
ridicule of the "haythen furriners," and goaded on by the smothered
squeal of a hidden pig, Michael "went for" the nearest Asiatic, and
proceeded to "put a head on him as big as a tank," amid a storm of kicks
and digs from the other Chows. Presently the battle began to go against
the Irish cause; but Mrs. Mickey, making a timely appearance, warded off
the surplus Chinamen by chipping at their skulls with an axe-handle. The
riot was soon quelled, and the two Doyles departed triumphantly, bearing
away a corpulent young pig, and leaving several broken, discouraged
Chinamen to be doctored at the common expense.

After this gladsome little episode the Chinamen held off for a few weeks.
Then they suddenly changed their tactics, and proceeded to cultivate the
friendship of Michael Doyle and his able-bodied wife. They liberally
patronized the Shamrock, and beguiled the licensee with soft but cheerful
conversation; they flattered Mrs. Doyle in seductive pigeon-English, and
endeavoured to ensare the children's young affections with preserved
ginger. Michael regarded these advances with misgiving; he suspected the
Mongolians' intentions were not honourable, but he was not a man to spoil
trade--to drop the substance for the shadow.

This state of affairs had continued for some time before the landlord of
the Shamrock noticed that his new customers made a point of carrying off
a brick every time they visited his caravansary. When leaving, the bland
heathen would cast his discriminating eye around the place, seize upon
one of the sun-dried bricks with which the ground was littered, and steal
away with a nonchalant air--as though it had just occurred to him that
the brick would be a handy thing to keep by him.

The matter puzzled Mr. Doyle sorely; he ruminated over it, but he could
only arrive at the conclusion that it was not advisable to lose custom
for the sake of a few bricks; so the Chinese continued to walk off with
his building material. When asked what they intended to do with the
bricks, they assumed an expression of the most deplorably hopeless
idiocy, and suddenly lost their acquaintance with the "Inglisiman"
tongue. If bricks were mentioned they became as devoid of sense as
wombats, although they seemed extremely intelligent on most other points.
Mickey noticed that there was no building in progress at their camp, also
that there were no bricks to be seen about the domiciles of the pagans,
and he tried to figure out the mystery on a slate, but, on account of his
lamentable ignorance of mathematics, failed to reach the unknown quantity
and elucidate the enigma. He watched the invaders march off with all the
loose bricks that were scattered around, and never once complained; but
when they began to abstract one end of his licensed premises, he felt
himself called upon, as a husband and father, to arise and enter a
protest, which he did, pointing out to the Yellow Agony, in graphic and
forcible language, the gross wickedness of robbing a struggling man of
his house and home, and promising faithfully to "bate" the next lop-eared
Child of the Sun whom he "cot shiftin' a'er a brick."

"Ye dogs! Wud yez shtale me hotel, so't whin me family go insoide they'll
be out in the rain?" he queried, looking hurt and indignant.

The Chinaman said, "No savee." Yet, after this warning, doubtless out of
consideration for the feelings of Mr. Doyle, they went to great pains and
displayed much ingenuity in abstracting bricks without his cognizance.
But Mickey was active; he watched them closely, and whenever he caught a
Chow in the act, a brief and one-sided conflict raged, and a dismantled
Chinaman crawled home with much difficulty.

This violent conduct on the part of the landlord served in time to
entirely alienate the Mongolian custom from the Shamrock, and once more
Mickey and the Chows spake not when they met. Once more, too, promising
young pullets, and other portable valuables, began to go astray, and
still the hole in the wall grew till the after-part of the Shamrock
looked as if it had suffered recent bombardment. The Chinamen came while
Michael slept, and filched his hotel inch by inch. They lost their
natural rest, and ran the gauntlet of Mr. Doyle's stick and his
curse--for the sake of a few bricks. At all hours of the night they crept
through the gloom, and warily stole a bat or two, getting away unnoticed
perhaps, or, mayhap, only disturbing the slumbers of Mrs. Doyle, who was
a very light sleeper for a woman of her size. In the latter case the lady
would awaken her lord by holding his nose--a very effective plan of her
own--and, filled to overflowing with the rage which comes of a midnight
awakening, Mickey would turn out of doors in his shirt to cope with the
marauders, and course them over the paddocks. If he caught a heathen he
laid himself out for five minutes' energetic entertainment, which fully
repaid him for lost rest and missing hens, and left a Chinaman too
heart-sick and sore to steal anything for at least a week. But the
Chinaman's friends would come as usual, and the pillage went on.

Michael Doyle puzzled himself to prostration over this insatiable and
unreasonable hunger for bricks; such an infatuation on the part of men
for cold and unresponsive clay had never before come within the pale of
his experience. Times out of mind he threatened to "have the law on the
yalla blaggards;" but the law was a long way off, and the Celestial
housebreakers continued to elope with scraps of the Shamrock, taking the
proprietor's assaults humbly and as a matter of course.

"Why do ye be shtealing me house?" fiercely queried Mr. Doyle of a
submissive Chow, whom he had taken one night in the act of ambling off
with a brick in either hand.

"Me no steal 'em, no feah--odder feller, him steal em," replied the
quaking pagan.

Mickey was dumb-stricken for the moment by this awful prevarication; but
that did not impair the velocity of his kick--this to his great
subsequent regret, for the Chinaman had stowed a third brick away in his
pants for convenience of transit, and the landlord struck that brick;
then he sat down and repeated aloud all the profanity he knew.

The Chinaman escaped, and had presence of mind enough to retain his
burden of clay.

Month after month the work of devastation went on. Mr. Doyle fixed
ingenious mechanical contrivances about his house, and turned out at
early dawn to see how many Chinamen he had "nailed"--only to find his
spring-traps stolen and his hotel yawning more desperately than ever.
Then Michael could but lift up his voice and swear--nothing else afforded
him any relief.

At last he hit upon a brilliant idea. He commissioned a "cocky" who was
journeying into Ballarat to buy him a dog--the largest, fiercest,
ugliest, hungriest animal the town afforded; and next day a powerful,
ill-tempered canine, almost as big as a pony, and quite as ugly as any
nightmare, was duly installed as guardian and night-watch at the
Shamrock. Right well the good dog performed his duty. On the following
morning he had trophies to show in the shape of a boot, a scrap of blue
dungaree trousers, half a pig-tail, a yellow ear, and a large part of a
partially-shaved scalp; and just then the nocturnal visits ceased. The
Chows spent a week skirmishing round, endeavouring to call the dog off,
but he was neither to be begged, borrowed, nor stolen; he was too
oldfashioned to eat poisoned meat, and he prevented the smallest approach
to familiarity on the part of a Chinaman by snapping off the most
serviceable portions of his vestments, and always fetching a scrap of
heathen along with them.

This, in time, sorely discouraged the patient Children of the Sun, who
drew off to hold congress and give the matter weighty consideration.
After deliberating for some days, the yellow settlement appointed a
deputation to wait upon Mr. Doyle. Mickey saw them coming, and armed
himself with a log and unchained his dog. Mrs. Doyle ranged up alongside,
brandishing her axe-handle, but by humble gestures and a deferential
bearing the Celestial deputation signified a truce. So Michael held his
dog down, and rested on his arms to await developments. The Chinamen
advanced, smiling blandly; they gave Mr. and Mrs. Doyle fraternal
greeting, and squirmed with that wheedling obsequiousness peculiar to
"John" when he has something to gain by it. A pock-marked leper placed
himself in the van as spokesman.

"Nicee day, Missa Doyle," said the moon-faced gentleman, sweetly. Then,
with a sudden expression of great interest, and nodding towards Mrs,
Doyle, "How you sissetah?"

"Foindout! Fwhat yer wantin'?" replied the host of the Shamrock, gruffly;
"t' shtale more bricks, ye crawlin' blaggards?"

"No, no. Me not steal 'em blick--odder feller; he hide 'em; build big
house byem-bye."

"Ye loi, ye screw-faced nayger! I seed ye do it, and if yez don't cut and
run I'll lave the dog loose to feed on yer dhirty carcasses."

The dog tried to reach for his favourite hold, Mickey brandished his log,
and Mrs. Doyle took a fresh grip of her weapon. This demonstration gave
the Chows a cold shiver, and brought them promptly down to business.

"We buy 'em hotel; what for you sell'em--eh?"

"Fwhat! yez buy me hotel? D'ye mane it? Purchis th' primisis and yez can
shtale ivery brick at yer laysure. But ye're joakin'. Whoop! Look ye
here! I'll have th' lot av yez aten up in two minits if yez play yer
Choinase thricks on Michael Doyle."

The Chinamen eagerly protested that they were in earnest, and Mickey gave
them a judicial hearing. For two years he had been in want of a customer
for the Shamrock, and he now hailed the offer of his visitors with secret
delight. After haggling for an hour, during which time the ignorant Hi
Yup of the contorted countenance displayed his usual business tact, a
bargain was struck. The yellow men agreed to give fifty pounds cash for
the Shamrock and all buildings appertaining thereto, and the following
Monday was the day fixed for Michael to journey into Ballarat with a
couple of representative heathens to sign the transfer papers and receive
the cash.

The deputation departed smiling, and when it gave the news of its triumph
to the other denizens of the camp there was a perfect babel of
congratulations in the quaint dialogue of the Mongol. The Chinamen
proceeded to make a night of it in their own outlandish way, indulging
freely in the seductive opium, and holding high carouse over an
extemporized fantan table, proceedings which made it evident that they
thought they were getting to windward of Michael Doyle, licensed
victualler.

Michael, too, was rejoicing with exceeding great joy, and felicitating
himself on being the shrewdest little man who ever left the "ould sod."
He had not hoped to get more than a twenty-pound note for the dilapidated
old humpy, erected on Crown land, and unlikely to stand the wear and tear
of another year. As for the business, it had fallen to zero, and would
not have kept a Chinaman in soap. So Mr. Doyle plumed himself on his
bargain, and expanded till he nearly filled his capacious garments.
Still, he was harassed to know what could possibly have attached the
Chinese so strongly to the Shamrock. They had taken samples from every
part of the establishment, and fully satisfied themselves as to the
quality of the bricks, and now they wanted to buy. It was most peculiar.
Michael "had never seen anything so quare before, savin' wanst whin his
grandfather was a boy."

After the agreement arrived at between the publican and the Chinese, one
or two of the latter hung about the hotel nearly all their time, in
sentinel fashion. The dog was kept on the chain, and lay in the sun in a
state of moody melancholy, narrowly scrutinizing the Mongolians. He was a
strongly anti-Chinese dog, and had been educated to regard the
almond-eyed invader with mistrust and hate; it was repugnant to his
principles to lie low when the heathen was around, and he evinced his
resentment by growling ceaselessly. Sunday dawned. It was a magnificent
morning; but the rattle of the Chinamen's cradles and toms sounded from
the creek as usual. Three or four suave and civil Asiatics, however,
still lingered around the Shamrock, and kept an eye on it in the
interests of all, for the purchase of the hotel was to be a joint-stock
affair. These "Johns" seemed to imagine they had already taken lawful
possession; they sat in the bar most of the time, drinking little, but
always affable and genial. Michael suffered them to stay, for he feared
that any fractiousness on his part might upset the agreement, and that
was a consummation to be avoided above all things. They had told him,
with many tender smiles and much gesticulation, that they intended to
live in the house when it became theirs; but Mr. Doyle was not
interested--his fifty pounds was all he thought of.

Michael was in high spirits that morning; he beamed complacently on all
and sundry, appointed the day as a time of family rejoicing, and in the
excess of his emotion actually slew for dinner a prime young sucking pig,
an extravagant luxury indulged in by the Doyles only on state occasions.
On this particular Sunday the younger members of the Doyle household
gathered round the festive board and waited impatiently for the lifting
of the lid of the camp-oven. There were nine children in all, ranging in
years from fourteen downwards--"foine, shtrappin' childer, wid th' clear
brain," said the prejudiced Michael. The round, juicy sticker was at last
placed upon the table. Mrs. Doyle stood prepared to administer her
department--serving the vegetables to her hungry brood--and, armed with a
formidable knife and fork, Michael, enveloped in savoury steam, hovered
over the pig.

But there was one function yet to be performed--a function which came as
regularly as Sunday's dinner itself. Never, for years, had the
housefather failed to touch up a certain prodigious knife on one
particular hard yellow brick in the wall by the door, preparatory to
carving the Sunday's meat. Mickey examined the edge of his weapon
critically, and found it unsatisfactory. The knife was nearly ground
through to the backbone; another "touch-up" and it must surely collapse,
but, in view of his changed circumstances, Mr. Doyle felt that he might
take the risk. The brick, too, was worn an inch deep. A few sharp strokes
from Mickey's vigorous right arm were all that was required; but, alas!
the knife snapped whereupon Mr. Doyle swore at the brick, as if holding
it immediately responsible for the mishap, and stabbed at it fiercely
with the broken carver.

"Howly Moses! Fwhats that?"

The brick fell to pieces, and there, embedded in the wall, gleaming in
the sunbeam, was a nugget of yellow gold. With feverish haste Mickey tore
the brick from its bedding, and smashed the gold-bearing fragment on the
hearth. The nugget was a little beauty, smooth, round, and four ounces to
a grain.

The sucking pig froze and stiffened in its fat, the "taters" and the
cabbage stood neglected on the dishes. The truth had dawned upon Michael,
and, whilst the sound of a spirited debate in musical Chinese echoed from
the bar, his family were gathered around him, open-mouthed, and Mickey
was industriously, but quietly, pounding the sun-dried brick in a
digger's mortar. Two bricks, one from either end of the Shamrock, were
pulverized, and Michael panned off the dirt in a tub of water which stood
in the kitchen. Result: seven grains of waterworn gold. Until now Michael
had worked dumbly, in a fit of nervous excitement; now he started up,
bristling like a hedgehog.

"Let loose th' dog, Mary Melinda Doyle!" he howled, and, uttering a
mighty whoop, he bounded into the bar to dust those Chinamen off his
premises. "Gerrout!" he screamed--"Gerrout av me primises, ye thavin'
crawlers!" And he frolicked with the astounded Mongolians like a tornado
in full blast, thumping at a shaven occiput whenever one showed out of
the struggling crowd. The Chinamen left; they found the dog waiting for
them outside, and he encouraged them to greater haste. Like startled
fawns the heathens fled, and Mr. Doyle followed them, howling:

"Buy the Shamrock, wud yez! Robbers! Thaves! Fitch back th.' soide o' me
house, or Oi'll have th' law onto yez all."

The damaged escapees communicated the intelligence of their overthrow to
their brethren on the creek, and the news carried consternation, and
deep, dark woe to the pagans, who clustered together and ruefully
discussed the situation. Mr. Doyle was wildly jubilant. His joy was only
tinctured with a spice of bitterness, the result of knowing that the "
haythens" had got away with a few hundreds of his precious bricks. He
tried to figure out the amount of gold his hotel must contain, but again
his ignorance of arithmetic tripped him up, and already in imagination
Michael Doyle, licensed victualler, was a millionaire and a J.P.

The Shamrock was really a treasure-house. The dirt of which the bricks
were composed had been taken from the banks of the Yellow Creek, years
before the outbreak of the rush, by an eccentric German who had settled
on that sylvan spot. The German died, and his grotesque structure passed
into other hands. Time went on, and then came the rush. The banks of the
creek were found to be charged with gold for miles, but never for a
moment did it occur to anybody that the clumsy old building by the track,
now converted into a hotel, was composed of the same rich dirt; never
till years after, when by accident one of the Mongolian fossickers
discovered grains of gold in a few bats he had taken to use as hobs. The
intelligence was conveyed to his fellows; they got more bricks and more
gold--hence the robbery of Mr. Doyle's building material and the anxiety
of the Mongolians to buy the Shamrock. Before nightfall Michael summoned
half-a-dozen men from "beyant," to help him in protecting his hotel from
a possible Chinese invasion. Other bricks were crushed and yielded
splendid prospects. The Shamrock's small stock of liquor was drunk, and
everybody became hilarious. On the Sunday night, under cover of the
darkness, the Chows made a sudden sally on the Shamrock, hoping to get
away with plunder. They were violently received, however; they got no
bricks, and returned to their camp broken and disconsolate.

Next day the work of demolition was begun. Drays were backed up against
the Shamrock, and load by load the precious bricks were carted away to a
neighbouring battery. The Chinamen slouched about, watching greedily, but
their now half-hearted attempts at interference met with painful
reprisal. Mr. Doyle sent his family and furniture to Ballarat, and in a
week there was not a vestige left to mark the spot where once the
Shamrock flourished. Every scrap of its walls went through the mill, and
the sum of one thousand nine hundred and eighty-three pounds sterling was
cleared out of the ruins of the hostelry. Mr. Doyle is now a man of some
standing in Victoria, and as a highly respected J.P. has often been
pleased to inform a Chinaman that it was "foive pound or a month."

A VISIT TO SCRUBBY GULLY

THE men at the mine were anxious to have me visit our magnificent
property. The battery and water-wheel were erected, there were 50 tons of
stone in the hopper, and we only needed water and the blessing of
Providence to start crushing out big weekly dividends. I know now that
there has never been a time within the memory of man when Scrubby Gully
did not want water, and that Scrubby Gully is the one place on earth to
which a discriminating man would betake himself if he wished to avoid all
the blessings of Providence for ever. But that is beside the matter.

I was carefully instructed by letter to take the train to Kanan, coach it
to the Rabbit Trap, take horse from Whalan's to the Cross Roads, ask
someone at Old Poley's on the hill to direct me to Sheep's Eye; from
there strike west on foot, keeping Bugle Point on my right, and "Chin
Whiskers" would meet me at The Crossing. There was no accommodation at
the mine for city visitors, but I was given to understand Mr. Larry Jeans
would be happy to accommodate me at his homestead over the spur.

Casual references to Mr. Jeans in the correspondence gave me the
impression that Jeans was an affluent gentleman of luxurious tastes and a
hospitable disposition, and that a harmless eccentricity led him to
follow agricultural and pastoral pursuits in the vicinity of Scrubby
Gully instead of wasting his time in voluptuous ease in the city.

"Chin Whiskers" met me at The Crossing. "Chin Whiskers" was a meditative
giant who exhausted his mental and physical energies chewing tobacco, and
who bore about his person interesting and obvious evidence of the length
and the severity of the local drought--he was, in fact, the drought
incarnate. The Crossing was a mere indication of a track across a yellow,
rock-strewn indentation between two hills, which indentation, "Chin
Whiskers" informed me, was "The Creek." That did not surprise me, because
I knew that every second country township and district in Australia has a
somewhat similar indentation which it always calls "The Creek." Sometimes
"The Creek" has moist places in it, sometimes it is quite damp for almost
a dozen miles, but more often it is as hard and dry as a brick-kiln. When
the indentation is really wet along its whole length it is invariably
called "The River."

I found the mine; it was a simple horizontal hole bored in a hill. The
battery was there, and the water-wheel. The water-wheel stood
disconsolate beside the dust-strewn creek, and looked as much at home as
a water-wheel might be expected to look in the centre of the sandy wastes
of Sahara. The working shareholders were unaffectedly glad to see me.
They were sapless and drought-stricken, but they assured me, with great
enthusiasm, that they lived in momentary expectation of a tremendous
downfall. Leen had been mending the roof of his hut, he said, in
readiness for the heavy rains which were due before morning. He examined
the sky critically, and expressed a belief that I would be detained on
Scrubby Gully a couple of weeks or so in consequence of the floods.

This spirit of unreasonable hopefulness and trust seemed to be shared by
Cody, and Ellis, and MacMahon. I alone was dubious. The journey up had
worn me out; the dry desolation all around and the flagrant
unprofitableness of our spec. sickened me; but Jeans still remained--the
prodigal Jeans, with his spacious homestead and profuse hospitality. I
was heartfully grateful for Jeans. We met in due course. As I talked with
Leen, a man came wearily down the hill, towing a meagre horse, which in
turn was towing a log. This man delivered his log, unslung his animal,
and approached us, heroically lugging behind him the miserable apology
for a horse--a morbid brute manifestly without a hope or ambition left in
life, and conveying mysteriously to the observer a knowledge of its fixed
and unshakable determination to lie down and die the moment its owner's
attention was otherwise directed. But the proprietor seemed fully alive
to the situation, and never allowed his thoughts to stray entirely from
the horse, but was continually jerking its head up, and addressing
towards it reproaches, expostulations, and curses--curses that had lost
all their vigour and dignity. This man was Jeans, and if I had not seen
his horse I would have said that Jeans was the most hopelessly
heart-broken and utterly used-up animal breathing on the face of the
earth. He was about 40, grey, hollow-cheeked, hollow-chested, bent, and
apathetic with the dreadful apathy that comes of wasted effort, vain
toil, and blasted hopes. Jeans had a face that had forgotten how to smile
and never scowled--a face that took no exercise, but remained set in the
one wooden expression of joyless, passionless indifference to whatever
fate could offer henceforth and forever. My last hopes exploded at the
sight of him.

Mr. Larry Jeans said I was welcome to camp in the spare room "up to" his
place, and added dully that "proberly" his missus could scrape up grub
enough for me "fer a day'r two." "Proberly" did not sound very
encouraging, but I had no option, and, being dead-beat, accepted the
hospitality offered, and followed Mr. Jeans. Larry laboriously hauled his
melancholy horse over a couple of low stony rises, and then we tackled
the scrag end of the range, across which led a vague track that wound in
and out amongst a forest of great rocks, and presented all the
difficulties and dangers of mountaineering without its compensations.
Jeans struggled on with dull patience, and in silence, saving when it was
necessary to divert the old horse from his morbid thoughts, and when he
briefly answered my questions. I gathered from him that the men at the
mine had been expecting rain for four months.

"And what do you think of the chances?" I asked.

"Oh, me, I never expect nothin'. Sometimes things happen. I don't expect
'em, though."

"Things happen--what, for instance?"

"Well, dry spells."

I elicited that pleuro happened, and rabbits, and fires, and "this here
new-fangled fever." But whatever happened Jeans never fluctuated; he had
struck an average of misery, and was bogged in the moral slough. It
seemed as if his sensibilities above a certain capacity had been worn out
by over-work, and refused to feel more than a fixed degree of trouble, so
that whatever might come on top of his present woes, be it fever, or
fire, or death, the man remained in his normal condition of grim apathy
and spiritless obedience to fate.

The "homestead" stood upon the flat timbered country beyond the rise. It
was just what Jeans's homestead might have been expected to be--a low
structure of bark and slabs, with a slab chimney at one end, and a door
in the middle between two canvas "windows." It stood in a small clearing;
just beyond the house stood the skeleton of a shed, upon which, it being
sundown, roosted a few gaunt fowls; a lank cow with one horn was deeply
meditating by the front door. There were signs of bold raids upon the
stubborn bush, pathetic ventures; and great butts lay about in evidence
of much weary but unprofitable work. A dog-leg fence, starting at no
particular point, straddled along in front of the house, and finished
nowhere about a hundred yards off. Not a new fence either, but an old
one, with much dry grass matted amongst the logs--that was the pathos of
it. There had been a brave attempt at a garden, too; but the few fruit
trees that stood had been stripped of the bark, and the hens had made
dust-baths in all the beds. In this dust an army of children were
wallowing--half-clad, bare-footed, dirt-encrusted children, but all hale
and boisterous.

At the door we were met by Mrs. Larry Jeans, and after introducing me as
"him from the city," the master laboured away, dragging his shuffling
horse, and leaving me in the centre of a wondering circle of youngsters
of all sorts and sizes, from two dusty mites not yet properly balanced on
their crooked little legs up to a shock-headed lubberly boy of thirteen,
curiously embossed with large tan freckles, and a tall, gawky girl of the
same age in preposterously short skirts, whom my presence afflicted with
a most painful bashfulness. A peculiarity about Jeans's children that
struck me was the fact that they seemed to run in sets: there was a pair
even for the sticky baby deftly hooked under its mother's left arm,
judging by the petulant wailing to be heard within.

The Jeans's homestead consisted of two compartments. I looked about in
vain for the "spare room," and concluded it must be either the capacious
fire-place or the skeleton shed on which the hens were roosting. The
principal article of kitchen furniture was a long plank table built into
the floor; between it and the wall was a bush-made form, also a fixture.
A few crazy three-legged stools, a safe manufactured from a zinc-lined
case, and an odd assortment of crockery and tin cups, saucers, and plates
piled on slab shelves in one corner, completed the list of "fixings."

Mrs. Larry Jeans was a short, bony, homely woman, very like her
husband--strangely, pathetically like in face and demeanour; similarly
bowed with labour, and with the same air of hopelessness and of accepting
the toils and privations of their miserable existence as an inevitable
lot. She was always working, and always had worked; her hands were hard
and contorted in evidence of it, and her cheek was as brown and as dry as
husks from labouring in the sun.

We had tea and bread and boiled onions and corned beef for tea that
evening--a minimum of beef and a maximum of onions. The last onion crop
had been a comparative success somewhere within half a day's journey of
Scrubby Gully. Tea served to introduce more children; they dangled over
the arms of the unhappy mother, hung to her skirts, sprawled about her
feet, squabbled in the corners, and overran the house. Jeans helped to
feed the brood in his slow, patient way, and after tea he helped to pack
away the younger in little bundles--here, there, and everywhere--where
they slept peacefully, but in great apparent peril, whilst the bigger
kids charged about the room and roared, and fought, and raised a very
pandemonium of their own. Every now and again Mrs. Jeans would lift her
tired head from her sewing or her insatiable twins, and say weakly, "Now,
you Jinny, behave." Or Larry would remark dispassionately, "Hi, you,
Billy!" But otherwise the youngsters raged unchecked, their
broken-spirited parents seeming to regard the noise and worry of them as
the lightest trial in a world of struggling and trouble.

I asked Jeans how many children he thought he had. He didn't seem
certain, but after due deliberation said there might be thirteen in all.
He had probably lost count, for I am certain I tallied fifteen--seven
sets and one odd one.

When the washing-up was done, and half of the family were bedded down,
Larry dragged a tangle of old harness from the other room, and sat for
two hours painfully piecing it up with cord, and his wife sat opposite
him, silent and blank of face, mending one set of rags with another--I
perched upon a stool watching the pair, studying one face after the
other, irritated at length by the sheeplike immobility of both, thinking
it would be a relief if Jeans would suddenly break out and do something
desperate, something to show that he had not, in spite of appearances,
got beyond the possibility of sanguinary revolt; but he worked on
steadily, uncomplainingly, till the boy with the unique freckles came
hurrying in with the intelligence that the old horse was "havin' a fit'r
somethin'." Jeans did not swear. He said "Is he but?" and put aside his
harness, and went out, like a man for whom life has no surprises.

The selector was over an hour struggling with his hypochondriac horse,
whilst I exchanged fragments of conversation with Mrs. Jeans, and went
upon various mental excursions after that spare room. It appeared that
the Jeanses had neighbours. There was another family settled seven miles
up the gully, but Mrs. Jeans informed me that the Dicksons, being quiet
and sort of down-hearted, were not very good company, consequently she
and Jeans rarely visited them. I was indulging in a mental prospect of
the jubilation at a reunion of the down-hearted Dicksons and the gay and
frivolous Jeanses when Larry returned from his struggle with the horse.
He resumed his work upon the harness without any complaint. His remark
that "Them skewball horses is alwis onreasonable" was not spoken in a
carping spirit; it was given as conveying valuable information to a
stranger.

At 11 o'clock my host "s'posed that p'r'aps maybe" I was ready to turn
in. I was, and we went forth together in quest of the spare room. The
room in question proved to be a hastily-constructed lean-to on the far
corner of the house, at the back. Inside, one wall was six feet high and
the other was merely a tree-butt. My bunk was built against the butt, and
between the bunk and the roof there were about eighteen inches of space.
That bunk had not been run up for a fat man. After establishing me in the
spare room Jeans turned to go.

"Best bar the door with a log, case o' the cow," he said. "If she comes
bumpin' round in the night, don't mind. She walks in her sleep moonlight
nights."

It only needed this to convince me that I was usurping the customary
domicile of the meditative cow. The room had been carefully furbished up
and deeply carpeted with scrub ferns. But the cow was not to be denied.

Weary as I was, I got little sleep that night. I had fallen off
comfortably about half an hour after turning in, when I was awakened
again by some commotion in the house. Half a dozen of the children were
blubbering, and I could hear the heavy tread of Larry, and the equally
heavy tread of his wife, moving about the house. Presently both passed by
the lean-to, and away in the direction of the range. For another
half-hour or so there was silence, and then the one-horned cow came along
and tried my door. Failing to open it, she tried the walls and the roof,
but could not break her way in, so she camped under the lee of the
structure, and lowed dismally at intervals till day-break.

When I arose a scantily-attired small boy generously provided me with a
pint pannikin three-parts full of water. The water was for my morning
bath, and the small boy was careful to warn me not to throw it away when
I was through with it. This youngster told me that "Dad, an' mum, an'
Jimmy" had been out all night hunting Steve. Steve, I gathered, was the
one enterprising child in the household, and was in the habit of going
alone upon voyages of exploration along the range, where, being a very
little fellow, he usually lost himself, and provided his parents with a
night's entertainment searching for him in the barren gorges and about
the boulder-strewn spurs of the range. How it happened that he was not
missed till nearly midnight on this occasion I cannot say, unless the
father and mother were really as ignorant of the extent and character of
their family as they appeared to be.

Mrs. Jeans was the first to return, and she brought Steve with her. The
dear child had not been lost, after all. Incensed by some indignity that
had been put upon him during the afternoon, he had "run away from home,"
he said, and slept all night in a wombat's hole about 200 yards from the
house. There his mother found him, returning from her long, weary search.
The incident did not appear to have affected her in any way; she looked
as tired and as heart-sick as on the previous evening, but not more so.

"You know we lost one little one there"--she extended her hand towards
the low, rambling repellent hills--"an' found him dead a week after."

Larry returned half an hour later, and his apathy under the circumstances
was simply appalling.

We had fried onions and bread and tea for breakfast, and immediately the
meal was over Larry, who I imagined would be going to bed for a few
hours, appeared in front of the house leading his deplorable horse. He
was bound for the mine, he said. I put in that day exploring the tunnel,
examining the immovable mill, hunting for specimens in the quartz-tip,
and listening to Leen's cheerful weather prophesies; and Jeans and his
soured quadruped dragged logs to the mine from a patch of timber about a
mile off, which patch the men alluded to largely as The Gum Forest.

Returning to the homestead at sundown we found the children fighting in
the dust and the one-horned cow meditating at the door as on the previous
evening. I fancied I detected in the eye of the cow a look of pathetic
reproach as I passed her. Tea that evening consisted mainly of roast
onions. Jeans felt called upon to apologize because the boys had been
unable to trap a rabbit for my benefit.

"Now'n agen, after a rainy spell, we're 'most afraid the rabbits is
a-goin' to eat us, an' then when we'd like a rabbit-stoo there ain't a
rabbit to be found within twenty mile," said the settler impassively.
"When there is rabbits, there ain't onions," he added as a further
contribution to the curiosities of natural history.

The second night at Scrubby Gully was painfully like the first: Mrs.
Jeans stitched, Mr. Jeans laboured over his tangle of harness, and the
brood rolled and tumbled about the room, raising much dust and creating a
deafening noise, to which Larry and Mary his wife gave little heed. When
a section of the family had been parcelled up and put to sleep, I was
tempted to ask Jeans why he continued to live in that unhallowed,
out-of-the-way corner, and to waste his energies upon a parched and
blasted holding instead of settling somewhere within reach of a market
and beyond the blight of tangible and visible despair that hung over
Scrubby Gully and its vicinity.

"Dunno," said Jeans, without interest, "'pears t'me t'be pretty much as
bad in other places. Evans is the same, so's Calder."

I did not know either Evans or Calder, but I pitied both from the bottom
of my heart. Jeans admitted that he had given up hope of getting the
timber off his land, though he "suspected" he might be able to handle it
somehow "when the boys grew up." He further admitted that he didn't know
"as the land was good for anythin' much" when it was cleared but his
pessimism was proof against all my arguments, and I went sadly to bunk,
leaving the man and his wife working with slow, animal perseverance,
apparently unconscious of the fact that they had not slept a wink for
over thirty hours.

The cow raided my room shortly after midnight. She managed to break down
the door this time, but as her intentions were peaceful, and as it was
preferable rather to have her for a room-mate than to be kept awake by
her pathetic complaints, I made no attempt to evict her, and we both
passed an easy night.

I was up early next morning, but Mr. and Mrs. Jeans were before me. They
were standing together down by the aimless dog-leg fence, and the
hypochondriacal horse lay between them. I walked across, suspecting
further "unreasonableness" on the part of the horse. The animal was dead.

"Old man, how'll you manage to haul those logs in now?" As Mrs. Jeans
said this I fancied I saw flicker in her face for a moment a look of
spiritual agony, a hint of revolt that might manifest itself in tears and
bitter complainings, but it passed in the instant.

Jeans merely shook his head, and answered something indicative of the
complete destruction of his faith in "them skewbald horses."

We had bread and onions for breakfast.

When I last saw Jeans, as I was leaving Scrubby Gully that day, he was
coming down the hill from the direction of the gum forest, struggling in
the blinding heat, with a rope over his shoulder, towing a nine-foot
sluice leg.

We had a letter from Leen yesterday; he says the working shareholders are
hurrying to get the sluice fixed over the wheel, and he (Leen)
anticipates a heavy downfall of rain during the night.

AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD PIONEER

MANAGER M`Fie had seen the 12 o'clock shift below, and now, tired and
disgusted, he kicked off his wet things, and "turned in." Manager M`Fie's
hut was quite a salubrious summer residence, but the rain had already
picked holes in the bark roof. An iron bucket suspended above the head of
the bunk caught the tiny stream that would otherwise have dribbled upon
his pillow, an oil-skin coat turned the drops that rained upon the foot
of the bed into a miniature river meandering along the hard clay floor,
and the darkness was made musical by the tinkling sound of drops falling
into tin dishes placed here and there about the hut to catch them. Mack
curled down amongst the blankets under his great 'possum rug, swore a
prayer or two, and endeavoured to give himself up to sweet forgetfulness
of his "danged roomertism," the fact that she was pinching out--"she"
being the reef--and his many other managerial troubles.

Outside the night was pitch dark, and the rain raced by in successive
charges, driven by the howling wind that caught and tore the gusts of
phosphorescent steam above the engine-house at the mine, and sent the
fragments streaming and curling away amongst the complaining trees like
maddened wraiths. The driver in the well-lighted, rain-tight engine-house
whistled contentedly over his work, and the battery boys, under
comfortable shelter, rather delighted in the storm, the howling of which
could be heard even above the thunder of the stampers; but the
unfortunate braceman, crouching in the lee of one of the poppet-legs
beneath the misty yellow glow of his lantern, cold, soddened, and more
than half afraid of the tempest, that shook the brace vigorously under
its bare poles, muffled the chattering of his teeth with a big quid, and
heartily envied the facemen in the warm stopes and drives below.

Sleep was long coming to the weary "skipper;" he lay awake for hours,
feeling the rheumatism like rats gnawing in his old bones, and swearing
quietly but with the emphasis of a devout "Geordie." At length, whilst
listening intently for the four o'clock whistle, oblivion fell upon him,
and a deep organ note mingled with the tinkling of the raindrops in the
scattered tins.

Mack imagined he had not slept twenty minutes when he was roughly
awakened. He felt himself being energetically shaken, and heard a voice
with a decided note of terror in it mixed up with the march, march, march
of the rain and the long shrill cries of the wind in the dead gums. A
shower of water rained upon his face from wet oilskins as he turned, and
the voice of Tom White called again:--

"For God's sake, boss, tumble up! The 'big blow' has caved in, and the
old shaft is choked with reef."

The manager was out on the sloppy floor in a moment, groping for his
clothes.

"An' Brierly, Brierly--D----n it all, man! what about Brierly?" he
gasped.

"He is trapped like a rat."

"Lord, Lord!" groaned M`Fie, "an' there hasn't been a man near the cursed
hole for months before to-night."

Mack discovered the matches, but they were like mush in his hand, and he
was compelled to tear his way into his clothes in the darkness. Presently
he rushed after White towards the mine. The whistle was piping piteously
against the storm, which still thundered in the gully.

A hasty examination served to inform the manager of the extent of the
disaster, which troubled him all the more for the fact that it was not
quite unforeseen and might have been avoided. About forty yards from the
working shaft of the Old Pioneer mine was another and a smaller shaft,
one that had been sunk by the discoverers of the reef. At the lower-most
level of the latter hole the two shafts were connected by means of a
drive for the purpose of improving the air in the workings. Within about
fifty feet of the surface the original workers had opened out and struck
a big blow of quartz, the very richest of the lode, and in taking out the
stone had excavated a great irregular chamber, reaching in places to
within twenty feet of the surface. This chamber they eventually stowed
full of loose reef from the lower workings, with the dual object of
saving hauling and holding up the ground. It was a bad job from a miner's
point of view, but when a small independent party is on rich stuff that
is not expected to hold out the members rarely waste time on fancy
mining. Long since the surface over the excavation had settled down,
leaving a large hollow place. To-night the great pressure of the many
tons of earth, combined with the force exerted by the swelling of the
reef, caused by the moisture that percolated through, had crushed out the
timbers that walled up the mouth of the old drive, and sent the broken
reef pouring into the pit, like the waters of a cataract, filling eighty
feet of shaft in the winking of an eye.

If this were all the accident might not have been very serious, but at 12
o'clock M`Fie had sent Bill Brierly to put in a shift in a small drive
leading from the air-shaft towards the Old Pioneer, and about thirty feet
from the bottom of the former. Scarcely any work had been done in this
drive since it was opened out, and now the shaft was choked, and Brierly
was penned in that tiny chamber, with air enough, Mack reckoned, to last
a man five hours, provided he had sense enough to put out his candles,
and sit and wait for death in the dark--a hair-bleaching, marrow-freezing
experience men say who have so sat and waited.

"Stop the battery!" roared M`Fie, after his cursory inspection. "Send the
boys to knock up the men at the Piper an' up at Mother Murty's. They'll
never hear that penny whistle agin this wind. White, you take Harry an'
Bricky an' a couple of others when they come, an' rig a win'las over the
air-shaft, an' pull reef till all's blue! Ben, go below--I expect Evans
an' Castro are already on the job. Chuck it down the winze, stow it
anywhere, an' work--work like fiends. If we don't get at Brierly inside
five hours I'm a done man, an' so is he!"

The manager remained on top a few minutes longer, giving orders to the
brace-man and the engine-driver, and then went below with a couple of
volunteers who had come out of the black bush, half-dressed and puffing
like engines. In No. 3, which drive ran into the old shaft, three silent
men, stripped to their flannels, reeking in the faint, ghostly light of
the candles, worked desperately upon the broken reef that had gushed into
the drive.

M`Fie and the others "took a hand," more men came down in the next cage,
and the next, and next, and presently wherever there was room for a man
to plant a shovel or push a truck a man was toiling with the magnificent
energy with which the meanest miner is endowed when the life of a mate is
at stake. On the brace three or four men handled the trucks as the cages
leapt to the landing. The engine throbbed, groaned, and strained like a
living thing, and the eager volunteers, stoking vigorously, kept steam up
to a dangerous pressure, while the safety-valve fairly shrieked under it.
At the mouth of the air-shaft a brawny contingent whirled the windlass,
pulling dirt from the top of the heap below, where two men toiled like
heroes. Six or seven others, waiting to relieve exhausted mates, gathered
in the red glow before the boilers, and talked of the imprisoned man in
low voices and with a newborn respect, telling all the best they knew of
him; and two or three frightened, curious women, with shawls drawn over
their heads, peered with white faces out of the surrounding darkness.

At daybreak the struggle was still going on with undiminished zeal, and
every handy place that would hold a truck of dirt was choked with reef,
and the cages sprang up with the full trucks or rattled down with the
"empties" swiftly, and with scarcely a pause.

Manager M`Fie worked with the best of them. Drenched with perspiration,
bruised and cut by pieces of falling reef, he faced the mass of dirt in
the old shaft, careless of danger and ignorant of fatigue. As fast as the
reef was shovelled away more rolled into the drive out of the shaft, but
at length Mack uttered a sharp exclamation of joy and pointed to a dark
open space showing below the cap-piece of the first set. Enlarging this
with a few strokes of the shovel, he seized a candle and examined the
shaft beyond; then, staggering back in the drive, bellowed a cheer that
was caught up by the men and echoed on the brace.

The unexpected had happened. The choked pit was a ladder-shaft; a stout
ladder, well stayed, ran up the side of the shaft, past the drive in
which Brierly was immured; between it and the slabs lining the shaft was
a space about 18 in. wide; large lumps of reef had jammed between the
rungs, and now, right up the side to the mouth of the drive, was a clear
passage, large enough to admit of the escape of a slight man like
Brierly.

"Steady lads--easy does it!" said Mack, as the men attacked the reef
again. "A wrong stroke might bring the stuff down again. Clear a way, an
let's see what can be done."

Mack put his head into the shaft and called, but no answer came back. He
called louder, again and again. Still there was no reply, and the old
manager turned away, and looked meaningly into the blank faces of the
men, and his own cheeks were grey with dread.

"I'll chance it, boss!"

A young fellow stepped forward--a trucker, a boy merely--with a plain,
strong face and glowing eyes, luminous with resolution.

"No, no, lad! it might mean death."

But young Stevens pushed by the extended arm and seized the ladder.
Somebody stuck a lighted candle on his hat with a scrap of moist clay,
and he went up the shaft on the under side of the ladder, climbing
gingerly, conscious that the least vibration might bring the reef rushing
in upon him. Mack watched him from below, and no man spoke a word. The
boy reached the drive, paused only a moment, and started down again. Half
a minute later he was dragged from the ladder by M`Fie's eager hands, and
the same instant the reef rushed in, and filled up the place where he had
been, and poured into the drive with a vibrant roar like thunder.

Stevens stood with his back to one of the legs for a moment, a
superstitious fear transfiguring his face, his limbs trembling painfully.

"He is not there!" he gasped in a choked voice.

"Not there?"

The boy shook his head.

"Then," murmured M`Fie, "he is there;" and he pointed towards the
filled-in shaft with a despairing gesture. "He must have made a rush for
the ladder when she started to run, and he's under the reef. It's all UP,
boys!"

Something like a groan broke from the lips of the men, but they seized
their shovels and went to work again--all but one man. Graham turned away
and walked towards the working shaft. He went up on the cage, and in less
than five minutes returned and drew M`Fie aside. He whispered a few words
in the manager's ear, and Mack followed him with an amazed look in his
face. The two men got on the cage, and Graham pulled the knocker,
signalling to the engine-driver to drop them at No. 2.

Graham led the way along No. 2, in which drive no work had been done for
some months, and presently stopped and threw the light of his candle full
upon the recumbent form of a man sleeping heavily upon a few slabs, his
head pillowed on his arm. Mack turned the face towards the light, and
beheld Bill Brierly, the supposed dead man. Graham, and M`Fie stared at
each other for a moment. Graham grinned feebly but Mack breathed a mighty
oath. Brierly's tea-flask lay near. The manager picked it up and brought
it to his nose.

"Drunk!" he ejaculated, kicking the sleeping miner.

"As a jackass," responded Graham, tersely.

Ten minutes later the brace-man called to the men below to knock off and
come up.

"We have got Brierly. He is alive!" he cried.

The men rushed the cages, cheering, and wondering. On top a circle of
disgusted miners stood round Bill Brierly, who lay sprawling on the floor
before the boilers, grinning inanely in his drunken sleep. The truth was
told in constrained whispers. Brierly was probably "half-screwed" when he
went on at 12; he had made his way to No. 2, the driest and warmest drive
in the mine, early in the shift, taking his flask of rum with him, and
intending, no doubt, to "do a comfortable loaf" up there; and there he
had lain, stupidly drunk, throughout those dreadful hours of anxiety and
toil. The men thought of their long struggle and their wasted sympathies,
of the reef piled everywhere about the workings, yesterday so orderly and
correct, and each man glanced into his neighbour's face, but none spoke;
no one even ventured to swear, and they could not laugh--the situation
was too tremendous for any form of expression of which they were capable.

One by one the worn-out miners dragged themselves away towards their huts
and houses, but M`Fie remained, sitting on a log, glowering at the
drunken man, his mind full of the choked winzes and drives below, and of
young Stevens cheek by jowl with death on the buried ladder.

"Ain't you going to turn in, boss?" someone asked.

"No," he said, angrily. "No. I'm goin' to sit here till Bill Brierly
sobers up, an' then, by thunder, I'm goin' to kick him from here to the
Piper, an' back again!"

"But, man, this is better than having to fish him from under the reef."

"I dunno, I dunno!" snarled Mack, striking his knee fiercely with his
great gnarled fist, "but I must kick that man or blow up!"

AT THE YARDS

WADDY, in its decadence, lived through two days of every week. The
awakening began late on Sunday night, or in the gloom of Monday morning,
with the sound of phlegmatic cursing--softened and chastened by distance
and the enfolding darkness--the yapping of busy dogs, the pathetic lowing
of weary beasts, the marching of many hoofs, the slow movements of big
flocks and herds on the ironstone road.

On Sunday evening Waddy was a mile-long township facing an apparently
interminable post-and-rail fence and a wide stretch of treeless country
dotted with poppet-legs--a township of some fifty houses, a Sunday-school
and a chapel; grey, weatherboard, rain-washed houses, and an old,
bleached, wooden day-school shored up on either side with stays, but
lurching forward and peering stupidly out of its painted windows with a
ludicrous suggestion of abject drunkenness. On Sunday evening Waddy was
still, silent, and apparently deserted, oppressed by the weight of a
Cousin-Jack Sabbath, but on Monday morning tents and covered carts linked
the scattered houses, camp-fires smoked everywhere, and bearded
cattle-men, making their scant toilet under the decent cover of a
cart-wheel or a rail-fence, enlivened the place with light-hearted
blasphemy and careless snatches of song, whilst flocks of sheep drifted
on the common, fraternizing with the local goats, and mobs of cattle came
slowly down the old toll-road, sniffing at the bare, brown track; the
dust-coloured, sleepy drovers, with sunken heads, nodding on their limp
horses.

Tuesday was sale-day. Monday afternoon was devoted to the yarding of
cattle and the yarding and drafting of innumerable sheep--the former a
comparatively easy and decorous undertaking; the latter a clamorous and
arduous business provocative of disgust, dust, and madness, and inducing
a thirst that afflicts the toiler like a visible disease, making him an
object of pity to all humane beholders. The average bullock is of
incalculable mental density, but he has the virtue of faith, and if you
wish him to go through a gateway he goes in blind confidence; but you may
pack a mob of five or fifty thousand sheep hard against a 10 ft. opening
in a fence, and you may yap yourself hoarse, and beat your trousers to
rags, and your dogs may bark their lungs up, without inducing a single
monumental idiot of the whole flock to venture through.

It is a hot afternoon--it always was a hot afternoon, it seems to me at
this distance--and scores of thousands of sheep are being hauled, and
bullied, and cursed, and cajoled into the yards, and from pen to pen.
There is a decided substratum of sound--the ceaseless, senseless bleating
of sheep, low and unvarying; above this the "yap, yap, yap" of the men
and boys, the sharp barking of the dogs, and the lowing of the cattle in
the high yards beyond. Over all, the dust and the sun--a burning, yellow
sun, and a rolling cloud of powdery dust--and everywhere in the air the
taint of sheep, the pungent smell of the beasts, and the taste of them if
you open your lips to breathe. It is a great time for several of the boys
of Waddy; it means half a day from school and the opportunity of earning
a shilling or two playing at work. Every healthy boy in the township is
ambitious to be a drover, and have a black pipe, a wonderful horse, and a
fabulous dog. Working at the yards is an approach to the ideal, and
confers a dignity obtainable in no other way. To the boys penned in the
stuffy little drunken schoolhouse the others who have a job at the yards
are kings, and objects of an envy unspeakable. They command humble
service, and awe, and admiration always.

With treasured whips, home-made of many fragments, the boys are busy
helping with the drafting and penning of the cattle, or, coated half an
inch deep with yellow dust, they are rushing the sheep up and down,
bleary black patches indicating where their eyes may be, and muddy
circles the probable situation of their mouths. It is hot, hard work,
but, oh! the glory of it, and the pride of walking home with money in
one's pockets, and covered with heaped-up, honourable dirt!

On sale-day the Drovers' Arms is hemmed in with conveyances of all sorts
and sizes, each with a sober horse or two tethered to a wheel, dreaming
with drooped heads under the scorching sun, or patiently foraging for the
last oat in the corner of the feed-box. The heat is the same, so are the
dust and the smells, but the noises of yesterday are supplemented by the
continuous rattle of the auctioneers' voices. Over the simmering stew
sound the voices like the crackling of gum-twigs in an open fire:--

"Fo'rteen T! fo'rteen T! fo'rteen T!
"All done eighteen, done eighteen, done eighteen!
"Fo'r pounds, I'm bid. Fo'r two six! fo'r two six!
"Fo'r two six! Goin'for--two--six!"

There are a few "drunks" sleeping in attitudes of absurd abandon along
M'Mahon's fence, coated with flies; and out on the common, with the whole
waste to themselves, two men, stripped to the buff, are engaging in a
dull, boozy, interminable fight. They have been fighting ineptly for many
hours, and their punctilious observance of the rules of the ring is the
wildest farce; but the comedy is wasted on Waddy, and the drovers are too
busy to give heed.

In the afternoon the cattle begin to move out again and off by the roads
they came, but the babel continues, and the buyers--stout, red, bibulous
men of one pronounced type--follow the auctioneers in knots along the
platforms over the yards. The cattle are not the meek, weary animals of
yesterday; they have been hustled from one yard to another, rushed
around, whipped and prodded, packed into small pens, and cursed and
orated over to the complete loss of their few poor wits, and there is now
a decided note of revolt in the lowing that rises up from the yards like
a lingering curse. In every lot turned out there are one or two beasts
filled with blind, blundering hate; they swing up the road, leading the
mobs, red-eyed and possessed of devils; cords of saliva hang from their
muzzles, and their moaning is ominous, suggesting the vacuous complaining
of a maniac.

The youngsters coming from school keep close to the rail-fence, but they
delight to run deadly risks, and fill the air with the profane shrieks of
the drovers. Often a goaded, homicidal bullock bolts, and then young
hearts are glad. It is wonderful sport to behold that frantic race for
the distant timber--the long, rolling plunge of the bullock, with the
good horse working on his shoulder, and the volleying whip kicking up
dust and hair from his hollow ribs.

The clatter of the auctioneers grows fainter and hoarser, and the
perishing beasts in the pens below toss up their heads like the branches
of wind-blown trees, and push hither and thither ceaselessly with a
pitiful "mooing."

Marks is selling a pen of Bellman's stock in No. 26. The buyers cluster
about him on top of the fence, and bidding is brisk. One bullock, a fine
red beast, has knocked himself about badly; his tail has been torn clean
away, one horn is cracked close to the head, and the thick red blood
oozes out, and blackens rolling sluggishly down the white blaze of his
face. It is a large yard, and there is plenty of room for the brute to
charge, which he does several times, now and then driving blindly into
another bullock, but generally cracking his skull sharply on the great
posts of the fence. Suddenly a portly, helmeted buyer, leaning over to
get a better view, misses his centre of gravity and goes after it, the
whole 16 st. plumping solidly into the slush of the yard below. The red
bullock is at him instantly. The good horn takes Langley in the back of
the trousers, and the drive rips him bare to the collar, leaving him
unmarked, but prone, in a condition of unseemly nudity.

The beast backs away for another drive, shaking his head and uttering his
low, tigerish bellow, the expression of all malevolence; but at the same
moment a figure drops smartly from the platform, and a ragged, smudgy,
red-headed small boy is riding astride the animal's neck, diverting his
attention by battering him over the eyes with an old felt hat. Dicky
Haddon has performed this feat often for his own amusement, to the
amazement of staid and matronly cows, but this is a beast of another
colour, and the trick is done in response to an involuntary heroic
impulse.

The bullock backs about the yard, tossing his head in an effort to be rid
of his mysterious burden, and many hands clutch stout old Langley from
the other pen, and tow him along through the mire to the gate, the bottom
rail of which is high enough from the ground to enable them to pull him
out of danger. Then he is borne away, unnerved and invertebrate. The boy
seizes his opportunity, drops from the bullock and slips under the gate
like a cat. Then he follows Langley, and stands in eager expectance
whilst the damaged grazier is being bundled into his buggy. Really
Langley suffers from nothing more serious than blue funk, but is
oblivious of everything excepting a great craving for neat brandy, and is
driven off without bestowing even a glance on his small preserver.

This base ingratitude inspires the youth with a loathing that can only be
expressed in the choice idiom of the yards, and the disappointed hero,
dancing in the road with his thumb to his nose, yells bitter and profane
insults after Jabez Langley, moneyed man and M.L.A.

A SABBATH MORN AT WADDY

SUNDAY-SCROOL was "in" at Waddy. The classes were all in place, and of
the teachers only Brother Spence was absent, strange to say. This was the
first Sunday of the new superintendent's term, always an evil time for
grace, and a season of sulkiness, and bickering, and bad blood. Each
beloved brother coveted the dignity of the office, and those who failed
to get it were consumed with envy and all uncharitableness for many
Sabbaths after. Some deserted the little wooden chapel on the hill till
the natural emotions of prayerful men pent in their bosoms could no
longer be borne, and then they stole back, one by one, and condoned in
hurricanes of exhortation with rain and thunder.

Brother Nehemiah Best occupied the seat of office behind a deal table on
the small platform, under faded floral decorations left since last
anniversary. Rumour declared that Brother Best was unable to write his
own name, and whispered that he spent laborious nights learning the hymns
by heart before he could give them out on Sunday, as witness the fact
that he "read" with equal facility whether the book was straight, or
end-ways, or upside down. Brother Best was thin-voiced, weak in wind, and
resourceless and unconvincing in prayer. No wonder Brother Spence was
disgusted. Brother Spence could write his own name with scarcely more
effort than it cost him to swing the trucks at the Phoenix; his voice
raised in prayer set the loose shingles fairly dancing on the old roof;
and his recitation of "The Drunkard's Doom" had been the chief attraction
on Band of Hope nights for years past. Ernest Spence had not hesitated to
express himself freely at Friday evening's meeting:

"Ay, they Brother Best, he no more fit for pourin' out the spirit, you,
than a blin' kitten. Look at the chest of en!"

"True for en, Ernie!" cried Brother Tresize.

"They old devil, you, he laugh at Best's prayin', sureli. Brother Spence
some tuss, you."

But Brother Spence had left the meeting in a state of righteous
indignation. Yet here were Brothers Tresize, and Tregaskis, and Prator,
and Pearce, and Eddy. True, they all looked grim and unchastened, and
there was an uneasy, shifty feeling in the chapel that inspired boys and
girls, young men and young women, teachers and choir, with great
expectations. Brother Best, in his favourite attitude, with one arm
behind him under his coat tails, his right hand holding the book a yard
from his eyes, his right foot thrust well out, the toe touching the floor
daintily, made his first official announcement:

"We will open they service this mornin' by singing hymn won, nought,
won."

Then, in a nasal sing-song, swinging with a long sweep from toe to heel
and heel to toe, he gave out the first verse and the chorus, ending
unctuously with a smack of the lips at the line:

Thou beautiful, beautiful Poley Star!

Nehemiah was a dairyman, and had a fixed conviction that the poley star
and a poley cow had much in common.

The hymn being sung, the superintendent engaged in prayer, speaking
weakly, with a wearisome repetition of stock phrases, eked out with
laboured groans and random cries.

Brother Tresize could not disguise his cynical disgust, and remained
mute. A prayer to be successful amongst the Wesleans of Waddy must make
the hearers squirm and wriggle upon their knees, and cry aloud. Brothers
and sisters were all happy when moved to wild sobbing, to the utterance
of moans, and groans, and hysterical appeals to heaven, and when impelled
to sustain a sonorous volley by the vigorous use of pocket handkerchiefs;
but that was a spiritual treat that came only once in a while, with the
visit of a specialist, or when the spirit moved Brother Spence or Brother
Tresize to unusual fervor.

The superintendent's prayer did not raise a single qualm; and the boys of
Class II. straggled openly over the forms, pinched each other, and passed
such rubbish as they could collect to Dicky Haddon, the pale, saintly,
ginger-headed boy at the top of the class, who was in honour bound to
drop everything so sent him in amongst the mysteries of the old, yellow,
guttural harmonium, through a convenient crack in the back.

Throughout the service Brother Best, proud of his new office, watched the
scholars diligently, visiting little boys and girls with sudden sharp
raps or twitches of the ear if they dared even to sneeze, but judiciously
overlooking much that was injurious and unbecoming in the bigger boys of
Class II., who had a vicious habit of sullenly kicking elderly shins when
cuffed or wigged for their misdeeds.

The Bible reading, with wonderful, original expositions of the obscure
passages by horny-handed miners, occupied about half an hour, and then
the superintendent stilled the racket and clatter of stowing away the
tattered books with an authoritative hand, and invited Brother Tresize to
pray. If he was great he could be merciful.

Brother Tresize made his preparations with great deliberation, spreading
a handkerchief large enough for a bed-cover to save the knees of his
sacred black-cloth trousers, hitching up the latter to prevent bagging,
and finally loosening his paper collar from the button in front to give
free vent to his emotions--and preserve the collar. Then, the rattling of
feet, the pushing and shoving, the coughing and whispering and sniffing
having subsided, and all being on their knees, Brother Tresize began his
prayer in a soft, low, reverent voice that speedily rose to a reverberant
roar.

"Oh, Gwad, ah! look down upon we here, ah; let the light of Thy
countenance ahluminate, ah, this little corner of Thy vineyard, ah. Oh,
Gwad, ah! be merciful to they sinners what be assembled here, ah; pour
down Thy speerit upon they, ah, make they whole, ah. Oh, Gwad, ah! Thoo
knowest they be some here, ah, that be wallerin' in sin, ah, some that be
hippycrits, ah, some that be cheats, ah, some that be scoffers, an'
misbelievers, an' heathens, oh, Gwad, ah! Have mercy on they people, oh,
Gwad, ah! Show they Thy fires, ah, an' turn they from the wrath, oh,
Loord Gwad, ah!"

Brother Tresize was evidently in fine form this morning; already the
windows were vibrating before the concussions of his tremendous voice,
and the floor bounded under the great blows that punctuated his
sentences. As he went on, the air became electrical, and the spirit moved
amongst the flock. The women felt it first.

"Oh, Gwad, ah!" interjected Mrs. Eddy from her corner.

"Throw up the windies, an' let the speerit in!" sobbed Mrs. Eddy.

Brother Prator blew his nose with a loud report, a touching and helpful
manifestation.

Brother Tresize prayed with every atom of energy he possessed. His
opinion was on record:

"A good prayer Sunday mornin', you, takes it out of en more'n a hard
shift in a hot drive, you."

When his proper momentum was attained he oscillated to and fro between
the floor and the form, swaying back over his heels till his head almost
touched the boards--a gymnastic feat that was the envy of all the
brethren--he shook his clenched fist at the rafters and reached his
highest note. The plunge forward was accompanied by falling tones, and
ended with a blow on the form that made every article of furniture in the
building jump. The perspiration ran in streams down his face and neck;
dry sobs broke from his labouring chest; long strands of his moist,
well-oiled, red hair separated themselves from the flattened mass and
stood out like feelers, to the wild, ungodly delight of Class II.; and
whilst he prayed the brethren and "sistern" kept up a continuous fire of
interjections and heartrending groans.

"They be people here, ah! what is careless of Thy grace; chasten 'em with
fire an' brimstone--chasten 'em, oh, Lord, ah! They be those of uz what
go to be Thy servants, oh, Gwad, ah! an' to do Thy work here below, ah,
what is tried an' found wantin', ah--some do water they milk, oh, Gwad,
ah! an' some do be misleadin' they neighbors' hens to lay away. Smite
they people for Thy glory, oh, Loord, ah!"

A great moaning filled the chapel, and all heads turned towards Brother
Nehemiah Best, kneeling at his chair, with his face buried in his hands,
trembling violently. Nehemiah, two years earlier, had been fined for
watering the milk sold to his town customers; quite recently he had been
thrown into the Phoenix slurry by an unregenerate trucker, who accused
him of beguiling his hens to lay from home. Brother Tresize was wrestling
with the superintendent in prayer, and the excitement rose instantly to
fever heat.

"They what do not as they wad be done by, pursue 'em, ah; smite they with
Thy right hand, oh, Lord Gwad, ah! so they may be turned from they
wickedness, ah. They what have better food to they table for theyselves
than for they children or they wives, ah, they what be filled with
vanity, ah, they what havin' no book-learnin' do deceive Thy people, an'
fill the seats o' the learned, ah, deal with such, oh, Gwad, ah!"

Brother Tresize was now almost frantic with the ecstasy of his zeal. His
exhortation was continued in this strain, and every word was a lance to
prick the cowering superintendent. The women sniffed and sobbed, the men
groaned and cried "Ahmen, ah!" It was a great time for grace.

But suddenly a new voice broke in--a shrill, thin voice, splitting into
that of Brother Tresize like a steam-whistle. Brother Best had assumed
the defensive.

"Oh, Lord, ah!" he cried, "give no ear to they what bears false witness
against they neighbors, to they what backbite, ah, an' slander, ah, an'
bear malice, ah; heed they not, oh, Lord, ah!"

Abel Tresize rose to the occasion. It was a battle. His voice swelled
till it rivalled the roar of the ravening lion; he no longer selected his
words or cared to make himself understood of the people; it was necessary
only to smother Brother Best, to pray him down, and Abel prayed as no man
had ever prayed before at Waddy. A curious crowd--the Irish children, Dan
the Drover, an old shepherd, and a few cattlemen from the Red
Cow--attracted by the great commotion, had assembled in the porch, and
were gazing in open-mouthed, delighted.

Tresize persevered, but Best's shrill, penetrating voice rang out
distinctly above all. Brother Best was transformed, inspired; under the
influence of his great wrath he had waxed eloquent; he smote his enemy
hip and thigh, he heaped coals of fire upon his head, and marshalled St.
Peter and all the angels against him.

The severity of his exertions was telling heavily upon Abel Tresize; he
was dreadfully hoarse, his great hands fell upon the form without
emphasis, he was almost winded, and his legs wobbled under him. He pulled
himself together for another effort, and the cry that he uttered thrilled
every heart, but it quite exhausted him, and he went over backwards,
striking his head upon the floor, and lay in the aisle convulsed in a
fit.

Instantly the chapel became a babel. The teachers ran to Brother Tresize,
and bore him into the open air, the wondering children crowding after,
and left the new superintendent sobbing on his table like a
broken-hearted boy.

THE TRUCKER'S DREAM

"I HAD a divil of a drame last night," said Bart O'Brien, as he crowded
his usual two-pound "plaster" of cold fried bacon and bread into his
crib-bag.

"'Drame,' d'ye call it?" muttered Brown from his bunk. "I thouoht you
had the buckin' fantods; you howled like a madman."

"Be Hiven, I don't wonder thin. I thought I was pumpin' away in the
place below there, whin thim two sets at the bottom av the incline came
away, an' I saw Lane crushed under thim. His dead face was starin' out
av the heap at me, all battered an' bloody, an' ghost-like in the
candle-light. Faith, an' I ain't much amused wid these lone shifts!"

The boys grinned at O'Brien's fears, but Gleeson muttered something
about the manager being "d--d well hanged" for not giving an eye to that
timber, and Gleeson was considered an authority.

Bartholomew O'Brien was a Bungaree native. In Bungaree the natives are
more Milesian than the Irish. Bart had for Father Cassidy a great,
childlike veneration that the ribald stories told of His Reverence by
Bart's sceptical hut-mates could not shake; and his belief in the
wonders and mysteries of his religion and the folklore of his mother's
country was profound. Bartholomew had also ruddy cheeks, and an
unreliable heart.

It was Sunday evening at Waddy, hot and thirst-provoking. His mates were
lounging about in their trousers on the tumbled bunks, but O'Brien was
due on the plat at nine o'clock, and was dressed in his working clothes.
He was a trucker at the Hand-in-Hand, and it was his turn to go below
into the mine and pump the water over the incline at the head of the
main drive on the lower level. Every Sunday night, after the long shift
off, this work had to be done by one of the truckers, so that the face
might be dry for the first night-shift, coming on at one a.m. None of
the boys liked the job--O'Brien hated it. In the presence of a tangible
danger he was as game a fellow as any in the district, but his
superstition--an ineradicable inheritance intensified by early
influences that bring the emotional side of the unlettered believer to
an unhealthy development, and leave to the man the reasoning faculties
of the child--made him little more than an irresponsible idiot when his
imagination ran riot amongst the spooks and wraiths. He had an
extraordinary stock of mottoes, religious and legendary, for warding off
the spirits, and possessed all the portable charms obtainable; but his
faith was not as powerful as his fears, and, in spite of these spiritual
arms and armour, he dreaded to be alone in the murderous old mine with
the ghosts of its many dead.

On going to the bottom level that night, and threading the course of the
long, tortuous main drive, the trucker found the water below the incline
higher than usual. The heavy iron pump stood over a slab-covered well in
a small chamber about ten feet by six, dug in the side of the drive. It
was worked with a back-racking up-and-down stroke, and lifted the water
into pipes, which carried it to the higher ground, whence it drained to
the shaft. The face was quite a thousand yards from the plat; and the
sound from the air-pipe, like the laborious breathing of some gigantic
animal afar off, offered no relief from the oppressive stillness and the
deathly atmosphere of the drive.

It is a trying thing to a man afflicted with the accumulated
superstitions of a hundred generations to be left alone for any time in
the deep, extensive workings of an old mine, every drive, and winze, and
shoot in which has its tale of blood and suffering. Bart O'Brien stuck
his candle to the side of the chamber, and paused to listen. The terror
was already strong upon him: his mouth was dry, and his heart beat like
a plunger, catching his breath at every pulsation. The chamber was deep
enough down and hot enough to suggest its proximity to the flaming home
of all the damned devils in whose existence Bartholomew implicitly
believed. He had done solitary duty several times at the pump, but never
before had his horror of it been so great as to-night. His dream
recurred to him, and he glanced uneasily towards the suspicious sets. He
was a believer in the portents of dreams--he expected something to come
of this one.

Catching at the long handle, Bart began to pump, almost in desperation.
Up and down, up and down--there was relief in action, and he worked
fiercely. The pump had been oiled recently, and ran smoothly and
noiselessly. This irritated him--he wanted hard work, something material
to fight with. And then the "click, clack," would have gone well to the
rhythm of an ancient Irish rhyme which his old mother held to be
infallible in keeping the elves from cows, and which he was wont to
mutter all the time when beset by supernatural enemies.

So hard was the mental battle O'Brien was fighting that bodily pain or
weariness never obtruded. With bent head and tightly-closed eyes he
toiled at the big pump, whilst the perspiration streamed from him and
ran through the folds of his scant clothing. Sometimes the face of
Geordie Lane, corpse-white and bloodstained, as he had seen it in his
dream, thrust itself upon him; then his brows met in cords, his hands
gripped the iron with a force that split his callous fingers, the handle
took a quicker, longer sweep, and the water boiled and foamed into the
wooden gutter in the drive.

Bart worked in this manner till about half-past eleven; then he was
startled by a gurgling, choking sound in the well beneath his feet, and
fell back into one corner of the chamber with an exclamation, his eyes
staring, full of fear.

The pump was drawing air! He had done four hours' hard work in little
over half the time. The drive was dry.

The young man's left arm was rubbed raw from the elbow to the wrist, and
his indurated hands were bleeding profusely from several deep cracks.
Bart gazed at the blood stupidly, and presently found himself listening
again--listening in the profound silence, out of which he heard at
length the distinct patter of footsteps. Small flakes of clay were
falling from the roof of the drive on to the muddy floor, but what
little reasoning power Bart had was lost by this time in a passion of
superstitious fear. He clutched the pump-handle once more, but it rose
and fell loosely, with a clatter, and drew no water.

With nothing for his hands to do, O'Brien was no longer able to control
his thoughts; they ran over the history of the mine--its list of killed.
He recalled the story of Martin's ghost haunting the old balance-shaft,
whilst the spirit of his wife, who died of grief, sought for him after
every shift in the next level. He remembered with startling vividness
Rooke, the braceman, as he looked spread upon the plat-sheets after
falling down five hundred feet of shaft-battered into a horrible mass,
out of which the face stood forth, ghastly white, and unmarked, though
the brain was laid bare as cleanly as by surgeon's saw. Then passed
before his eyes in grisly procession, showing their fearful wounds--Bill
the trucker, killed at No. 5 by a fall; Carter, brained in the shaft;
Praer and Hopkins, smashed in the runaway cage; Moore and German Harry,
blown up in the well when sinking; and Lane, pinched under the shattered
timber right before his eyes there in the drive.

O'Brien was crouching in the corner. No longer understanding that it was
only in a dream he had seen Lane killed, he expected a ghost to start up
before his eyes--a ghost with mangled limbs and a pale, blood-stained
face. He remained thus for some time, fighting the dread as it grew upon
him. At length he started up, and his fear found vent in a yell that
echoed shrilly through the workings. He meant to rush into the drive and
make his way to the shaft, but struck his head against the pump-handle
at the first stride, and was hurled back into the water, which had risen
again to the height of several inches.

The blow and the drenching steadied Bart a little, and he started
pumping once more, with nervous energy. Whilst he worked, the candle
fell from the wall and hissed out in the wet clay. He had no matches. In
a few minutes the pump was drawing wind again, and now O'Brien's
greatest trial began.

The darkness was solid, substantial--the young man felt it weighing upon
him with a pressure as of deep water, and his sense of solitude and awe
was such as might be known by the last, lone man in a waste, sunless
world. At times he crushed his ears with his hands to shut out the
dreadful silence, and then he heard the passing of spirit feet, the
muffled beat of wings, sobbing sounds, and long moans dying away beyond
the distant curves. His treacherous eyes saw fleeting forms and tense,
inhuman faces traced in faint, phosphorescent lines on the dense, black
wall that stood up before him. His agonized fears had now obtained
complete mastery of him, his mind ran in a frenzy from horror to horror,
and an intolerable dread filled his soul with hellish expectations.

He stood transfixed at the back of the chamber, his arms outspread, his
fingers dug knuckle-deep in the sodden reef. His eyes stared as in
death, and his mouth was open wide, the fallen lower jaw jerking
spasmodically. His greatest terror was of the thing he had seen at the
chamber-door--the corpse--face under the splintered timbers. He saw it
now, white as quartz, with clots of blood hiding the eyes; he felt its
presence--it mouthed at him--threatened him.

Out of the darkness and the silence of death came a faint rumbling
sound, like far-off thunder. It swelled and drew nearer. It roared in
the drive, and from the inky blackness, in a pale yellow light, Lane
rose up with a bloody face, and caught at O'Brien.

A minute or two later the men of the night-shift were shocked to meet
Lane rushing back from the face like a maniac, with a dead man in his
truck.

* * * * *

"Thoo's got a bad cut i' tha head thasel,' lad," said the boss of the
shift to Lane, half an hour later.

"Yes," he answered, "I slipped into that crab-hole at the second curve
going up, and knocked my forehead on the truck."

HEBE OF GRASSTREE

A CHANGE had come over the spirit of Grasstree; there was a false note in
the gaiety of the men up from Ramrod Flat, and the young fellows in the
pastoral interest around on the Black Cockatoo, when they foregathered in
Cleever's bar, discovered an un-accustomed awkwardness and restraint in
their attitudes towards each other. With miners and bushmen alike
confidence had given place to suspicion, and good-fellowship to an
all-round surliness.

For a time the men could not account even to themselves for this strange
alteration; an attempt was made to make the climate responsible, and a
few insisted that it was something in the drink, but certainly all had
become "sudden and quick in quarrel"--hats went down and hands went up on
the slightest provocation. Men whose ordinary work-a-day friendship had
previously heightened to brotherly love under the warming influence of
alcohol now became profane and bitter in drink, and short arguments
terminated with a rush and a collision in the bar. Little differences
that might previously have been settled by mutual concessions were now
nursed and coddled till they grew into hot enmities, and even Foster and
Brierly, once the best of mates, were camping apart and each working a
lone hand at Goat Creek.

Eventually Hetty Maconochie was generally recognized as the disturbing
element at the Grasstree, but, by tacit agreement, that fact was not
publicly admitted. Possibly a delicate and chivalrous consideration for
"Miss Mack's" sensibilities inspired this polite reticence, but perhaps
it chiefly arose from the shamefacedness of her worshippers. The man
out-back, secretive in most things personal, will admit any weakness or
wickedness ere confessing to the pangs of unrequited passion. Hence when
Hetty was particularly affable to Stacey on Monday evening in the bar,
and allowed Riverton to monopolize her smiles on Tuesday evening,
Riverton and Stacey fought a desperate and bloody battle on the Wednesday
afternoon to decide the ownership of a one-eyed dog which was the local
head depot for fleas, and which really belonged to a third man, who,
being public-spirited, waived his claim rather than spoil sport. Riverton
won the dog.

Of course Miss Maconochie was quite conscious that she had introduced a
new element into the relationship of things at the Grasstree, but,
although exultant in the knowledge that the men were contending with
animal ferocity for her favour, she appeared always quite oblivious, and
was genial or distant with the discrimination of a conscientious
barmaid.

Miss Mack had been sent to the Travellers' Rest from a Melbourne labour
office in response to Cleever's order, which specified "a strapping girl,
not more than 26, to work and assist in bar." Hetty was "strapping," and
certainly not more than 26; five feet seven, straight as a lath, strong,
ruddy-cheeked, and possessing a marvellous efflorescence of glorious red
hair as fine as spun silk, coruscant, throwing little subtle tendrils
down about her ears, her temples, and her long white neck. There are many
female Samsons. But Hetty's power was not wholly in her hair; her
strength was peculiarly attractive to the men; her every action suggested
strength--strength underlying a womanly softness and roundness. She often
served in the bar on warm evenings with her sleeves rolled well above her
shapely elbows, and then Cleever's patrons felt it was worth the price of
the drink to see "Mack" reach up for the bottle. She draped lightly for
comfort, and blushed to find it fame. The average woman who puts on much
to make herself attractive does not realize that half the art is in
taking off. Hetty was innocent of coquetry when she divested herself of
superfluous drapery, but she could not remain long ignorant of the
advantages she enjoyed from her emancipation. Then her laugh helped to
ensure success--it was a generous laugh, full of suggestive music, and
discovered new attractions in her large, handsome mouth. Such a laugh is
honeyed flattery for the man who provokes it, and, as Hetty was proud of
her fine white teeth, no man's joke was altogether a failure in Cleever's
bar.

There were other young women in and about the Grasstree--two or three in
the township, and settlers' and farmers' daughters judiciously
distributed over the district; but, although these had been courted, it
was in a temperate and bloodless manner. These girls were not slow in
concluding that Miss Maconochie was a person of extraordinary deceit and
peculiar morals. But Hetty was by no means a designing woman. Saving a
year spent in domestic service in an extremely Methodist household in
Melbourne, her knowledge of men and manners had been gathered in the bush
township where she was born and bred. Her morals were particularly
healthy; it was soon understood by Cleever's customers that "Mack" knew
how to take care of herself--an understanding that detracted not from the
zest of the pursuit.

After the morbid propriety of that Methodist household, Hetty revelled in
the unrestraint and comparative brilliancy of life at the Travellers'
Rest. Cleever was a widower, and not at all exacting, and in the bar of
evenings the girl received at least a specious show of respect
sufficiently gratifying to a young woman of her intellectual limitations.

The first battle fell about between Stacey and one of the Devoys. Both
had been dangling over the bar, chatting and larking with Hetty for an
hour or so, when Stacey's glass was upset in a bit of horse-play, and
Stacey, receiving its contents over his shirt-front, became a butt and an
object of derision to all in the bar. "Mack" laughed aloud, and flashed
her white teeth in the lamp-light, and Devoy laughed too, and Stacey's
blood grew hot, and he longed for slaughter. His opportunity came when
the girl left the bar a minute later. He confronted Devoy:

"Damn you, Devoy, you did that on purpose!"

It was entirely an accident, but neither was in any humour for
explanations. Devoy felt it was beneath him to excuse or parley; he
blurted much defiant profanity.

"What if I did! Why don't you drink up your liquor like a man!"

He was cut short by a swinging, open-hand blow. Then thud, thud, thud,
thud--four quick blows, two and two, with a sound as of a teamster
banging the ribs of his bogged horses with a shovel--and Stacey and Devoy
were fighting with the ferocity of tigers at mating-time.

Hetty returned to the bar to see the first blow struck, and now, leaning
over the counter, with sparkling eyes, glowing cheeks, and heaving breast
she watched the fight. There was none of the impassivity of the lolling
tigress in her attitude: she burned with excitement; she clenched her own
hands, and bruised her knuckles on the boards; she followed each swift,
cutting blow, and uttered inarticulate cries of wonder.

The men fought without science, fought with the brutality of powerful
men, wounding with every blow, but feeling nothing in their heat and
fury. A ring of onlookers circled round them, and outside this ring
danced Cleever--"Fighting" Cleever--with his "peacemaker," a
wicked-looking "waddy," eager to get in a blow and stun one of the
combatants, for the peace of Devil's End and the credit of the house.

The fight was not settled in Cleever's bar. Two or three rounds served to
exhaust the blind fury of the combatants, and then mutual friends
interceded, and a formal meeting was arranged for next day. A two hours'
struggle in Haddon's grass paddock on the following afternoon ended in
the defeat of Stacey, and that night Devoy appeared before Hetty
Maconochie, bruised, bandaged, and badly hacked about, but big with
victory. The fight was not discussed, but the girl quite understood, and
the conquering hero rejoiced in her luminous smile, and was sullenly
given the pride of place by his companions, who tacitly admitted this
right to the victor for the time being.

After that fistic battles were daily occurrences at Devil's End.
Callaghan, the solitary constable of the district, made a gallant attempt
to cope with the press of business, but after an exhausting week yielded
to public opinion and was officially blind and deaf when the battle-cries
were heard at the Travellers' Rest. Presently every second man in the
district possessed black eyes, split lips, or a swollen ear, or all these
things, and the local chemist did a roaring trade in court-plaster and
Friar's balsam. The men fought on the slightest provocation, or with no
obvious provocation at all; arguments on religion or politics invariably
ended in bloodshed; mates in the drives below disagreed as to the proper
locality for a "shot," and came blaspheming up the shafts to "settle it"
in a "mill;" the boys at "Old Burgoo's" fought viciously to maintain
their superiority as horsemen and shearers, and always the victorious
pugilist turned up at Cleever's, in all the glory of his wounds and
bruises, to invite the admiration of the creamy-skinned goddess with the
brown eyes.

Grasstree had discovered Hetty Maconochie. Previously she had received a
reasonable amount of attention from the men with whom she was thrown in
contact, but Grasstree had made her a sensation--a craze. She gloried and
revelled in her success, and the sense of pride and power it gave her.
Thinking over it through the day, she laughed with rapturous delight, and
felt like a queen amongst her pans. Cleever did well these times: there
were no tee-totallers left in and about Grasstree, and the Travellers'
Rest had absorbed all the business of the district. Being in love with
Hetty himself, Cleever made an effort to dispense with her help in the
bar, and excited an instantaneous revolt.

"Fetch out the girl," was the general demand. "You don't think we've
travelled down here to be served by a splay-mouthed Dutchman!"

Cleever was a Swede; but Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Belgians, Germans,
Austrians, and men of Holland are all Dutchmen out-back. Other foreigners
are invariably Frenchmen. If Hetty was not produced on demand there was
no more drinking, but much disorder and many accidents, and the
proprietor was always compelled to yield. Cleever fought with the rest.
He fought without science or discrimination, and nobody took any
satisfaction from an encounter with the "Dutchman." He never knew when he
was beaten, and had a ridiculous and disconcerting way of resuming the
battle, without word or warning, a day, a week, or a month after being
egregiously whipped. Being a foreigner, he did not allow any absurd
sentiment to interfere with his manner of fighting, and repudiated
British prejudices and British reverence for rule and precedent, and
fought with all his weapons--fists, nails, teeth, and feet. There was no
credit in beating Cleever; he couldn't fight, but he was always willing
to try, and, although he was considered wildly humorous in his tantrums,
his opponents rarely escaped an injury of some kind or another before the
battle was ended.

After much indiscriminate fighting, in the course of a couple of months
it was understood and admitted without argument that the final must be
contested by Riverton and Devoy. Both were unbeaten, and each would have
done battle with a raging lion for the love of Hetty Maconochie. Cleever
alone, of all the whipped candidates, refused to abandon his hopes of
winning his handsome Hebe, and was quite willing to "take on" the two
last aspirants one after the other or both together. The other men of
Grasstree, and Ramrod Flat, and Grecian Bend admitted themselves "out of
it," and it was quite understood that the winner of the Riverton-Devoy
contest had only to step up and take possession of the prize. This view
had never been questioned; Hetty's keen interest in the many battles, and
her evident delight in the knowledge that she was the prize in the
greatest competition that had ever shaken an Australian bush township out
of its habitual quietude and lethargy, were taken as indicating her
acquiescence. Certainly both Devoy and Riverton took it for granted that
the best man of the two was destined to marry the belle of Grasstree.

The great fight came off on a beautiful pitch under Grecian Bend on a
Tuesday morning, and half the male population of the district was there
to see. Devoy and Riverton fought because the latter had ventured before
witnesses to assert his disbelief in the story of Devoy's great shooting
exploit--a wonderful narrative, never before questioned at Grasstree. The
fight was long and stubborn. Both men were young, strong, hardened with
toil, active, game as peccaries, six-foot and a bit, and fighting for an
issue that seemed dear as dear life.

They fought bare-knuckled and stripped to the buff. There was no sparring
and no vain display; every blow cut or bruised; and during the first
half-dozen rounds the great toughened, knubbly fists were going like
sledge-hammers about a busy forge. After that it was a brutal exhibition
of butchery and endurance. Blood ran freely, dyeing the combatants and
darkening the grass. The faces of the fighters became unrecognizable, and
after the 13th round neither could see. By this time half the spectators
had sickened and turned away, and awaited the end at a distance. Devoy
was knocked clean out in the 19th round, and then Riverton was carried
away across three saplings, a bruised and battered champion, limp as a
wet shirt, but triumphant, and feeling drunk--happily, jubilantly drunk.

Riverton would have much liked to drag himself to the Travellers' Arms
that night, but it was impossible. He was helpless next night, and on the
following morning his bunk still held him captive. But on Friday night,
with the assistance of his mate, he conveyed his battered carcass into
Cleever's bar. A woeful spectacle was the champion of Grasstree, but his
wounds were glorious. About a dozen men sat in the bar. Cleever was in
attendance. The hero called for drinks all round.

"Where's Mack?" he asked authoritatively.

The publican had evaded this query from others for two days in order to
produce a good effect when the champion appeared to claim her. He
lingered over the answer now as he served the drinks.

"She haf went by dot city for der honeymoons," he said composedly.

"Wha-at!" Riverton sprawled upon the counter, and his bruised face went
livid.

"Vile you vos fight mit Devoy, she haf ride away in der coach to marry
anodder feller."

"Marry! marry! Who--who is he?"

"Tommy Haynes."

"Haynes!" Riverton stood upright, looking around upon his companions, but
saw only blank faces.

Tommy Haynes was the successful storekeeper of Grasstree, a small boyish
man of 24, slight and fair, with curls and a complexion. He would easily
have stood upright under Hetty's extended arm. Whilst others fought and
suffered Haynes courted--courted pluckily, with kisses and caresses and
pretty presents--courted and conquered. "Haynes!" repeated Riverton, with
a lingering, bitter imprecation, "that--that worm. By the Lord! when they
come back I'll put him over my knee and spank him before her face."

But they were two months coming, and long before their return Riverton
had thought better of it.

THE CONQUERING BUSH

NED "picked up" his wife in Sydney. He had come down for a spell in town,
and to relieve himself of the distress of riches--to melt the cheque
accumulated slowly in toil and loneliness on a big station in the North.
He was a stockrider, a slow, still man naturally, but easily moved by
drink. When he first reached town he seemed to have with him some of the
atmosphere of silence and desolation that surrounded him during the long
months back there on the run. Ned was about thirty-four, and looked
forty. He was tall and raw-boned, and that air of settled melancholy,
which is the certain result of a solitary bush life, suggested some
romantic sorrow to Mrs. Black's sentimental daughter.

Darton, taught wisdom by experience, had on this occasion taken lodgings
in a suburban private house. Mrs. Black's home was very small, but her
daughter was her only child, and they found room for a "gentleman
boarder."

Janet Black was a pleasant-faced, happy-hearted girl of twenty. She liked
the new boarder from the start, she acknowledged to herself afterwards,
but when by some fortunate chance he happened to be on hand to drag a
half-blind and half-witted old woman from beneath the very hoofs of a
runaway horse, somewhat at the risk of his own neck, she was enraptured,
and in the enthusiasm of the moment she kissed the hand of the abashed
hero, and left a tear glittering on the hard brown knuckles.

This was a week after Ned Darton's arrival in Sydney.

Ned went straight to his room and sat perfectly still, and with even more
than his usual gravity watched the tear fade away from the back of his
hand. Either Janet's little demonstration of artless feeling had awakened
suggestions of some glorious possibility in Ned's heart, or he desired to
exercise economy for a change; he suddenly became very judicious in the
selection of his drinks, and only took enough whisky to dispel his native
moodiness and taciturnity and make him rather a pleasant acquisition to
Mrs. Black's limited family circle.

When Ned Darton returned to his pastoral duties in the murmuring wilds,
he took Janet Black with him as his wife. That was their honeymoon.

Darton did not pause to consider the possible results of the change he
was introducing into the life of his bride--few men would. Janet was
vivacious, and her heart yearned towards humanity. She was bright,
cheerful, and impressionable. The bush is sad, heavy, despairing;
delightful for a month, perhaps, but terrible for a year.

As she travelled towards her new home the young wife was effervescent
with joy, aglow with health, childishly jubilant over numberless plans
and projects; she returned to Sydney before the expiration of a year, a
stranger to her mother in appearance and in spirit. She seemed taller
now, her cheeks were thin, and her face had a new expression. She brought
with her some of the brooding desolation of the bush--even in the turmoil
of the city she seemed lost in the immensity of the wilderness. She
answered her mother's every question without a smile. She had nothing to
complain of: Ned was a very good husband and very kind. She found the
bush lonesome at first, but soon got used to it, and she didn't mind now.
She was quite sure she was used to it, and she never objected to
returning.

A baby was born, and Mrs. Darton went back with her husband to their hut
by the creek on the great run, to the companionship of bears, birds,
'possums, kangaroos, and the eternal trees. She hugged her baby on her
breast, and rejoiced that the little mite would give her something more
to do and something to think of that would keep the awful ring of the
myriad locusts out of her ears.

Man and wife settled down to their choking existence again as before,
without comment. Ned was used to the bush--he had lived in it all his
life--and though its influence was powerful upon him he knew it not. He
was necessarily away from home a good deal, and when at home he was not
companionable, in the sense that city dwellers know. Two bushmen will sit
together by the fire for hours, smoking and mute, enjoying each other's
society; "in mute discourse" two bushmen will ride for twenty miles
through the most desolate or the most fruitful region. People who have
lived in crowds want talk, laughter, and song. Ned loved his wife, but he
neither talked, laughed, nor sang.

Summer came. The babe at Mrs. Darton's breast looked out on the world of
trees with wide, unblinking, solemn eyes, and never smiled.

"Ned," said Janet, one bright, moonlight night, "do you know that that
'possum in the big blue gum is crazy? She has two joeys, and she has gone
mad."

Janet spent a lot of her time sitting in the shade of the hut on a
candle-box, gazing into her baby's large, still eyes, listening to the
noises of the bush, and the babe too seemed to listen, and the mother
fancied that their senses blended, and they both would some day hear
something awful above the crooning of the insects and the chattering of
the parrots. Sometimes she would start out of these humours with a
shriek, feeling that the relentless trees which had been bending over and
pressing down so long were crushing her at last beneath their weight.

Presently she became satisfied that the laughing jackasses were mad. She
had long suspected it. Why else should they flock together in the dim
evening and fill the bush with their crazy laughter? Why else should they
sit so grave and still at other times, thinking and grieving?

Yes, she was soon quite convinced that the animals and birds, even the
insects that surrounded her, were mad, hopelessly mad, all of them. The
country was now burnt brown, and the hills ached in the great heat, and
the ghostly mirage floated in the hollows. In the day-time the birds and
beasts merely chummered and muttered querulously from the deepest shades,
but in the dusk of evening they raved and shrieked, and filled the
ominous bush with mad laughter and fantastic wailings.

It was at this time that Darton became impressed by the peculiar manner
of his wife, and a great awe stole over him as he watched her gazing into
her baby's eyes with that strange look of frightened conjecture. He
suddenly became very communicative; he talked a lot, and laughed, and
strove to be merry, with an indefinable chill at his heart. He failed to
interest his wife; she was absorbed in a terrible thought. The bush was
peopled with mad things--the wide wilderness of trees, and the dull, dead
grass, and the cowering hills instilled into every living thing that came
under the influence of their ineffable gloom a madness of melancholy. The
bears were mad, the 'possums, the shrieking cockatoos, the dull grey
laughing jackasses with their devilish cackling, and the ugly
yellow-throated lizards that panted at her from the rocks--all were mad.
How, then, could her babe hope to escape the influence of the mighty bush
and the great white plains beyond, with their heavy atmosphere of despair
pressing down upon his defenceless head? Would he not presently escape
from her arms, and turn and hiss at her from the grass like a vicious
snake; or climb the trees, and, like a bear, cling in day-long torpor
from a limb; or, worst of all, join the grey birds on the big dead gum,
and mock at her sorrow with empty, joyless laughter?

These were the fears that oppressed Janet as she watched her sad, silent
baby at her breast. They grew upon her and strengthened day by day, and
one afternoon they became an agonizing conviction. She had been alone
with the dumb child for two days, and she sat beside the hut door and
watched the evening shadows thicken, with a shadow in her eyes that was
more terrible than blackest night, and when a solitary mopoke began
calling from the Bald Hill, and the jackasses set up a weird chorus of
laughter, she rose, and clasping her baby tighter to her breast, and
leaning over it to shield it from the surrounding evils, she hurried
towards the creek.

Janet was not in the hut when Ned returned home half an hour later.
Attracted by the howling of his dog, he hastened to the waterhole under
the great rock, and there in the shallow water he found the bodies of his
wife and child and the dull grey birds were laughing insanely overhead.

A ZEALOT IN LABOUR

THE creek was hacked and mangled out of all semblance to a sylvan
rivulet.

The ruin effected looked like the work of many men. The muddy, yellow
stream had been diverted from its course several times within half a
mile, and all along the banks were torn down, great cuttings made, piles
of gravel heaped up, dams built, and races dug. But the ravisher was
there--a lone man, gouging his way into a bank at the head of the flat
where it met the hill, looking a mere midge amongst the destruction he
had wrought with his two good hands.

"Humpy" Bannon was puny and weazened and old; he had a hump between his
shoulders, and no intelligence to speak of, but he had the spirit of a
little red ant, magnified to suit his size. He loved labour, and he had
chosen Grim Creek as his vineyard. From a miner's point of view Bannon
was the discoverer of Grim Creek. He it was who prospected it and found
gold in it, and he was exceedingly proud of his field, although it was a
starvation hole at the best, and rewarded him for his tremendous
labours--digging, shovelling, puddling, cradling, wading in water, and
grubbing in sludge--with a few wretched pennyweights where ounces would
have been poor pay. But Humpy never thought of leaving. Wet days and fine
found him, smeared with clays of many colours, struggling in a wet shaft
or delving at the banks, full of enthusiasm, without resource, without
horse sense, but all grit.

"Leave the creek?" he would say in answer to the advice of casual
visitors. "Why, where'd I go ter?"

"Well, there's some good gold gettin' at Black Cap, an' I hear about
somethin' worth prospectin' ten miles out by Double-U Hill."

"No fear! you don't catch me leavin' the creek. Why, some o' them minin'
sharks from the city would be down here an'jump the claim afore I'd bin
gone a week."

"Jump this show, Humpy! Why, there is not gold enough in a mile of it to
buy a peanut."

Bannon couldn't restrain his temper when the creek--his creek--was
disparaged, and at this point always became incoherent between
extravagant predictions as to the fabulous richness of the wash he was
going to cut presently and insulting reflections upon the intelligence of
the maligner, and he would fall to working again more fiercely than ever,
jigging his old head the while, and chummering bitterly.

How he did graft! Little, and skinny, and aged, and ill-fed as he was, he
cheerfully faced mountains of labour, and wore them down by sheer
pertinacity--shifted them by faith and works. What wonders of toil can
one determined man perform in a year! To know you must see the man
struggling amongst the evidences of it, with the work of his hands piled
up about him, and the man's sole master must be a belief, sane or
otherwise.

Humpy's faith in Grim Creek was transcendent. That the creek gave him no
justification mattered not a scrap. He lived in a little bark hut,
comfortless as a mia-mia, on nothing in particular; he dressed at work in
a worn shirt, patched extravagantly, and deplorable trousers and boots,
and he wound lengths of sugee about his shins. His hat, a battered boxer,
a gift from a sympathetic selector, had a big hole fore and aft--driven
to extremes, he had once run a handle through it, and used it for a ladle
when cradling--and the whole costume was cemented and frescoed with the
grit and clay of the unspeakable creek.

The old man never had a mate--he never wanted one. He designed all sorts
of hare-brained, unworkable contrivances in the shape of dumb-waiters,
and cranks, and feed-pipes, and sluices, to overcome the difficulties
that hamper a lone hand, but through disappointments and dangers and
endless tribulation he struggled on, and turned up regularly every
Saturday afternoon at the log store on the Piper road with his pathetic
little packet of gold and his long familiar story of the good day that
was coming for Grim Creek and the surrounding district when he finally
"got on to it."

A few of the farmers and selectors in the district, thinking that
possibly, by reason of an unlooked-for contingency, Humpy might some day
"get on to it" and boom the place a bit, helped with gifts of food and
old clothes that to him were as good as new. One or two, from pure
wooden-headed good nature, visited him at times, especially on Sundays,
and sat with him in the sun or in his smoky hut, and let him talk to them
by the hour about his creek. Next to grafting in the creek like a tiger,
nothing pleased Humpy better than to prattle about his work, and invent,
and lie, and rhapsodize to a sympathetic audience.

Tom Hughes was the old digger's best friend. He had secured a selection
in the locality of Grim Creek within the last six months, built a hut
upon it, and settled down to take life as easily as a selector can who
observes the covenants. Hughes was a hatter--a big, hairy man, physically
slow, mentally alert, with a golden faculty of extracting amusement out
of anything and everything, from the capers of his waddling terrier pup
or the solicitude of a motherly hen to the foibles of his fellows. Hughes
enjoyed Humpy Bannon enormously. He cultivated him. He would sit and
study him by the hour, ponderous and apparently as grave as a fat frog
between meals, but with a soul full of laughter. Humpy reminded him of an
ant that he had once seen attempt to shift Mount Macedon. The ant thought
the mount obstructed its view, or felt that it had a call; anyhow, Tom
kept track of the insect for a week and neglected his duties to watch
progress, and when he left the ant was still going strongly. Now, here
was this other midge ripping up the face of nature and tearing at the
bowels of the earth after something he didn't really want and wouldn't
know how to appreciate. Wifeless, childless, without a taste superior to
mutton and bread or an aspiration above the puddling tub, and with very
few years of life before him, he worked from daylight to dusk, moving
mountains, and grew radiant describing the treasure he must win some day.
Yet ten shillings a week would have satisfied his needs, twelve would
have embarrassed him with riches.

Walking along the creek one day Hughes came upon the old man clambering
out of a prospecting hole on a rise. He was dripping wet, and coated with
mud; clay was in his hair and his ears, and the dirty water ran from him
as he stood. Humpy was too busy for conversation; he seized the windlass
handle and began hauling with terrific energy. There were two buckets on
the rope--one a kerosene tin, the other an ordinary water bucket. Humpy
landed and emptied these, and then, lowering the rope into the shaft
again, began to fish about. Presently he hooked another bucket and
brought it to the surface. After fishing once more he landed a nail keg.
Then he proceeded to let himself down again, sliding on the rope.

"What's the little game, old man?" asked Hughes as the dripping head
disappeared.

"After a bit o' wash here. Tremenjis rich, I think," answered Bannon up
the shaft.

"But it's too wet; you'll never be able to bottom, workin' her alone."

"Bet I will, though!"

Further comment was deferred by the pit-pit of the old man's pick in the
wet hole. Tom Hughes hooked the nail keg, and put in an hour or so at the
windlass, and was rewarded later with Humpy's confidence. As usual, the
little man was on the eve of a discovery that was going to revolutionize
the district, and bring a big town humming about their ears on Grim Creek
in less than no time. Hughes was a better miner than old Bannon, and
thought the latter was fighting after a vain thing, but he offered no
advice, understanding that it would be wasted, and remembering that it
was Humpy's policy to go and find out for himself at whatever cost of
sweat and patience.

Humpy did bottom that hole, and scraped up a prospect that promised about
ten "weights" to the load to a sanguine man, but the water was up within
three feet of the surface next morning, and eight hours' vigorous baling
had no appreciable effect. The claim could not be worked without a
diving-suit and apparatus.

So Humpy went apart and thought. He wasted little time in speculation,
and presently took a bee-line from his shaft to the foot of the rise, 250
yards off, and commenced an open cutting. His idea was to carry this
narrow cutting into the hill on a level as long as he could throw the
dirt, and then, when the sides became too high, to tunnel to the shaft,
and so drain the ground he wished to work. This represented about a
year's labour to an average man working decent hours and in moderation.
It was an utterly fatuous and foolhardy undertaking; as far as it was
possible to judge, the ground would not pay for the working, let alone
compensate for this gigantic "dead horse;" but Bannon did not
calculate--he worked. On the occasion of Hughes's next visit he found
Humpy pegging away industriously in his cutting. He had covered a good
distance in the shallow ground.

"Well, old party, what're you coursin' after now?" asked Tom.

Humpy explained between blows.

"Gee-rusalem, but you do lick 'ell an' all!"

Tom proceeded to explain the difficulties of the job, and the
ridiculousness of it; but the digger's under-hand pick was going busily
all the time, and at last Hughes seated himself upon a log and overlooked
the toiler in silent enjoyment of his wonderful courage, his
dunderheadedness, and the comical little ape-like figure and quaint
tricks and turns of the man. Humpy persisted, and in the weeks wore by
his cutting extended and deepened, and at length he was forced to take on
another contract. It was necessary to get the water away. He felled
trees, and split palings, and laid down a box drain all along the
cutting--a wonderful drain, representing much time and trouble. He
timbered his job where timber was needed, and continued as before eating
his way into the hill, and as he progressed his pride in his work
increased. The cutting was trim and true; Humpy bestowed the most loving
care upon it, and Tom Hughes brought all the strangers he came across to
inspect and admire it as the one spectacle of Grim Creek, and to gaze
upon Humpy and wonder over him. And whilst Tom stood aloft eulogizing the
digger with something of the air of a showman, and amiably explaining his
humours and eccentricities for the pleasure of these strangers, Humpy
hammered away eagerly on the job below.

"He ain't got common-sense about minin'," Hughes would say; "have you,
old man?"

Humpy, with his pick driven to the eye in the wall before him, would turn
up his puckered, tanned, hairy face with the aspect of a venerable
mandril, and damn his friend--hide, bones, and soul--as the selector went
on:--

"But in a tunnel or a drive he'd work any man I ever knew stone-blind
inside a week. Wouldn't you, Humpy?"

More profanity from below.

"See, he's built for it. Them shoulders was built fer pokin' round in low
black drives an' muddy tunnels, but he's wasted fer want of horse sense.
He's a blessed steam-engine whirling away like blazes, but doin' nothin'
that matters a hang. Look at him! He's the only man in Australia that
likes work--he'd rather