"All right! go to blazes, only don't expect us to pay you any more wages if you lose. Come in, colonel."
"Won't you come out instead, Mr. Corbett? It's better lying on the grass outside than in to-night."
"Guess he is right, Ned. Come along, you lazy old beggar!" cried Chance. And the three men in another minute were all lying prone on a blanket by the embers of a camp-fire, smoking their pipes and chatting lazily.
Corbett's tent—a marvel of London make, convertible into anything from a Turkish bath to a suit of clothes, and having every merit except the essential one of portability—stood upon the very edge of the encampment, commanding a view of the sea and the Olympic Range on the farther shore.
The encampment itself was a kind of annexe of the town of Victoria, standing where James Bay suburb now stands, although what is to-day covered with villas and threatened by an extension of the electric tramway was in '62 a place of willows and wild rosebushes.
Here lived part of the floating population of Victoria, miners en route to Cariboo, remittance-men sent away from home to go to the dogs out of sight of their affectionate relatives, and a good many other noisy good-fellows who liked to live in their shirt sleeves in the open air.
Corbett and Chance were the aristocrats of this quarter, thanks to the magnificence of their abode and the general "tonyness" of their outfit. In their own hearts they knew that they were victims to their outfitter—that they were living where they were instead of in a house merely out of regard for their tent, and for those mysterious camp appliances which all fitted into one another like Chinese puzzles.
That was where the shoe pinched. In a moment of pride they had pitched their tent (according to written instructions) and unpacked their "kitchen outfits," and they had never been able to repack them.
It was all very well to advertise the things as packing compactly into a case two feet by one foot six inches, but it required an expert to pack them; and so, unless they were minded to abandon their "fixings," they had to stay by them. Therefore they stayed, and said they preferred the open air, even when it rained, as it sometimes does even on Vancouver Island.