"No—I never could lay hold of him," said the steward, ignoring the pointed improvement upon his phrase.
"Well, I have," said the big miner in the doorway.
"You've laid hold of him?" the other queried in nervous incredulity.
The digger nodded a big black head that looked as picturesque as piratical in a knitted cap of bright scarlet.
"I'd been lookin' for him, too, you see. You weren't the only folks who had some beer off that Chinaman the day he come along first; me and my mates had some, and it did us so little harm that we've always wanted some more. So I've been lookin' for him ever since, and yesterday I found him at the other end o' the diggin's, away past Sailor's Gully. And why do you suppose he'd never been near us again?" asked the big black man without shifting a shoulder from either door-post.
"I don't know," said the steward, sulkily. "How should I?"
"How should you? Because you told him never to come no more!"
"He's a liar," hissed Jewson, with a tremulous oath.
"And why should you say he ever came at all?"
"Some other lie, I suppose," said Jewson, with another oath.