It was that which was puzzling Birralong. The last man in the district whom they expected to be carried away by the glib tales of nuggets by the bucketful and gravel running two ounces to the dish, was Tony Taylor; still less did they expect that he would leave his selection home, to say nothing of the charms of Birralong and Marmot's verandah, for a wild-cat yarn of travelling fossickers. He was one of the brightest lights in the district, handsome, dare-devil Tony. There was not a horse he could not ride, and his rivals had brought some pretty tough buckjumpers to test him at different times—"fair holy terrors," they called them—but Tony sat them, even when girth and crupper had carried away. He was the only individual who had been able to solve the mysteries of the form of the balls and the bumps in the cushions of the alleged billiard table which the owner of the Rest had bought many years before in a coastal town, and which had not been improved by a five-weeks' journey inland on a bullock-dray. He had always held the proud position of "ringer" in the shearing-sheds of the stations round Birralong, beating all comers by never having a tally of less than a hundred sheep shorn a day, and that with the old-fashioned hand-shears. The winner of the local races had always been ridden by Tony, and he had been known to lose the whole of his shearing earnings at euchre and win them back, together with all the money on the board, by wagering his next year's cheque. The feminine portion of the population for miles round had a bright eye for Tony whenever he appeared; but only one did he seriously fancy, according to the authority of Marmot's verandah, and she, by the same token, fully reciprocated his feelings, and was, moreover, the admitted beauty of the district. And yet Tony, not apparently on the spur of the moment, but calmly and with his eyes open, had thrown in his lot with the three fossickers, and had gone off without scarcely a word to any one. Why, Birralong collectively did not know, for there had not been time as yet for an assemblage to take place on the verandah of Marmot's store. The riddle would not long remain unsolved when it had.
The hour of the evening meal had come and gone; the buzz-saws had ceased to whirr and sing and the anvil hammers to ring through the still, hot air. The sun had left his perch overhead, and was sinking slowly towards the horizon, making the trees and houses throw long streaks and patches of shadow of soft purple-blue, which is so peculiarly Australian, across the yellow dust of the roadway. The mosquitoes were beginning to leave their shelters, and occasionally, within the shadows, the ping-zing of their high-toned note could be heard as one drifted by the ear. The wood-fire smoke rose straight and steadily from kitchen chimneys, as the sticks, set alight to boil the billy for tea, gradually went out, and the aromatic scent of it floated through the air, seeming to fit in with the chromatic whistle of the magpies from the gum trees in the paddocks. But the men who were gathered round Marmot's verandah noted nothing of these things. Marmot himself, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, sat on a box of Barret twist tobacco in the doorway, where he had the benefit of any draught there might be, and the majority of the adult male members of the population were sitting or standing around.
"It gets me. That's what it does, gets me clean," Marmot exclaimed. "Why Tony——well, there, he's the one lad I'd have taken into the store here to lend me a hand."
The immensity of the admiration and confidence implied by the remark for the moment silenced every one. No higher compliment could be paid by Marmot.
"It's a darned rum go," Smart, the saw-miller, observed solemnly. "He, who came as a kid and wanted to see if my band-saw 'ud take his head off in one swish—he, Tony Taylor, who knew enough at ten to spot the winner of the Cup, to go and get landed by a fossicker's yarn. There's a darned rum go."
"Yes; and where's the cause of it all?" Marmot asked. "There must be a cause. We'd all be black-fellows and earth-worms if it wasn't for a cause. There must be a cause, if we could only find it. Look for the cause, says I, in a case that's a bit mixed. But there ain't no cause in this, as I can see."
"Ain't there?" a man leaning against the end post of the verandah exclaimed. "Ain't there no cause? That's just your blooming error."
"Well, I'm no bush lawyer," Marmot replied, with a glance round the gathering. "It's more nor I can reason out."
"Look here," exclaimed the man, a selector who lived a couple of miles out from the township in solitary grandeur, and had an opinion, which might be right or wrong but was always strong, on every conceivable subject under the sun, especially the opposite sex, whom he cordially detested; "I'll tell you what's up. You believe me, a woman's to blame in this."
"Good iron, Slaughter," some one replied. "They're always the trouble."