Spicer lowered his voice.
"There was a man once shot dead in this one. Bushrangers!"
"When was that?"
"Oh, well, it was before my time."
"Ten years ago?"
"Ten to twenty, I suppose."
"Ten to twenty! Why, my good fellow, there was a blackfellows' camp in Collins Street, twenty years ago! Corrobborees, and all that, where the trams run now."
"I'm hanged if there were," rejoined Spicer warmly. "Not twenty years ago, no, nor yet thirty!"
"Say forty if it makes you happy. It doesn't affect my argument. You don't expect me to bolt out of this verandah because some poor devil painted it red before I was breeched? What shall it profit us that there were bushrangers once upon a time, and blacks before the bushrangers? The point is that they're both about as extinct as the plesiosaurus——"
"Kill whose cat?" interposed the storekeeper in a burst of his peculiar brand of badinage. "He's coming it again, Ives; you'll have another chance of showing off, old travelling-rug!"