At this time a public battery, owned by a limited company, was doing yeoman service to the dwellers on an alluvial field some five miles south of us; and after much consideration we, in common with the most of the miners, arranged to despatch our golden gravel thither, as being the only way out of a difficulty. Public batteries exist all over those goldfields, for, owing to the absence of water, a prospector can rarely do more than test samples of his find, and thereby estimate its value; and these public crushing plants are, therefore, a very necessary adjunct to his success.
The time passed pleasantly enough now that the trying uncertainty of the first fortnight was no longer with us, and the auriferous channel was being slowly and surely tunnelled and cut in every conceivable direction. Work was pursued in matter-of-fact fashion. The glamour of the goldseeker's life had departed with the risk.
Yet when the practical and perhaps sordid work of the day was done, and we gathered together around one or other of the numerous camp fires, it seemed as if a new world had descended upon us when daylight gave place to the mystic glimmer of the lesser stars and the steadfast radiance of the glorious Southern Cross. Only the world-wanderer who has slept beneath all skies can truly appreciate the grandeur of the southern constellations. The bushman has grown to love them from his infancy; they have been his companions on many a weary journey, and he regards them with an almost sacrilegious familiarity. But to the traveller from other lands these shining guide-posts in the heavens arouse a feeling akin to reverence, and later, when he ventures into his grim desert land and trusts his life to their constancy, his admiration, were it possible, increases tenfold. There is, of course, one great reason for the stranger's attachment to the sky sentinels of an Australian night other than their calm, clear brilliance. In no other country is the wanderer brought so close, as it were, to the luminaries of night. In Canada, Alaska, America, India, or China, or, indeed, in any portion of the globe, by reason of climatic or other conditions, one must perforce sleep under canvas, and in some cases where the cold is severe—as in Alaska—the shelter of a heavily-logged hut is almost a necessity. But in the inland parts of Australia, where rain seldom falls, and where no pestilence taints the atmosphere, the sky alone usually forms the traveller's roof. Many times have I gone to sleep in the great silent interior with only my coat for a pillow, and coaxed myself into slumber while watching for the advent of a favourite star, or tracing the gradual course of the Southern Cross.
To me the stars of the south have a peculiar significance. When I gazed at them, even while divided from civilisation by over a thousand miles of dreary arid sand plains, I felt comforted, for though compass and sextant may fail, the stars will still show the way.
I recall our evenings spent at the Five-Mile Camp with deepest pleasure. There only did I meet and talk with the typical men of the West, and the simple, true-hearted, restless spirits of the Island Continent who have pushed the outposts of their country far into the desert. It was my one experience of a Western Australian mining camp, and afterwards, during our weary wanderings in the far interior, we often longed for the company of the generous-minded men who used to gather round our fire and review their early experiences with such vivid effect.
Emu Bill, I have already mentioned, but there were several others whom we came to know during the later days of our sojourn at the golden flat, and they had all their own peculiar characteristics, with a sterling honesty of purpose as the keynote of their lives.
"Old Tom," I remember, possessed an interest in the claim next to ours; not much of an interest it was, either, for he was too old a man to have come in nearly first in the rush. He had simply been promised a percentage of returns in No. 8 for doing all the work thereon; and as at first the presence of gold there was much doubted, it was no great generosity on the part of the owner of the lot to promise slight reward and no wages for labour done. Yet for once Old Tom scored in a bargain, and his labours were not, as he cheerfully said they had ever been, wholly vain.
Old Tom must have been a splendid specimen of manhood in his day; now he was nearly seventy years of age, and his bent shoulders detracted somewhat from his great stature, while his slightly-bowed legs—whose deviation from the perpendicular, he insisted, had been caused by much walking—gave to him a more frail appearance than was justified.
His knowledge of his own country was extensive, but he had fallen into the strange belief that the world began at Australia, and that Europe, Asia, and other portions of the globe were merely remote colonies or dependencies of his own land. "I hiv walked all over Australia, mates," he used to say; "I know the world well."