"Fighting is all very well, Mr. Corbett, where people fight according to rules, but you had better drop it here. If you don't, some fellow will get level on you with the leg of a table or a little cold lead. If you must fight, you had better learn to shoot like old Rampike."
"Where is old Rampike now?" asked Ned, anxious to turn the conversation, and feeling a little ashamed of his escapade.
"Rampike went right on by the boat that met the Umatilla. He got a job up at Williams Creek, and will be there ahead of us."
"Then you mean to come up too, Roberts, that's right," said Corbett genially.
"Yes, I am coming up with your crowd. I met the count in town last night and borrowed the chips from him. I am thinking that if you make a practice of quarrelling with Cruickshank and all his friends you will need someone along to look after you."
"But who is the count, and why could you not have borrowed the money from us?" asked Corbett in a tone of considerable pique.
"The count! Oh, the count is an old friend, and lends to most anyone who is broke. It's his business in a way. You see, he is the biggest gambler in the upper country. Skins a chap one day and lends him a handful of gold pieces the next. He'll get it back with interest from one of us even if I don't pay him, so that's all right;" and honest Roberts dismissed all thought of the loan from his mind, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a professional gambler to lend an impecunious victim a hundred dollars on no security whatever.
Luckily for Ned his fellow countryman took him in hand after this, and what with singing and working managed to keep him out of mischief. For Roberts found Corbett work in Westminster which just suited his young muscles, though it was as quaint in its way as Roberts' own financial arrangements in their way.
It seemed that in the young city there was no church and no funds to build one, but there was a sturdy, energetic parson, and a mob of noisy, careless miners, who rather liked the parson; not, perhaps, because he was a parson, but because he had in some way or other proved to them that he was a "man."