"Don't be too sure," Peters said. "We had no chance of prospecting the other creek, with the mob jumping every one's claims, but I'm on to wager this is no bluff. There's gold in that creek; not in tons, maybe, but enough to give us wages, and good wages, for more than a week or two."
"You don't say!" exclaimed Palmer Billy, standing up beside the fire over which he had been stooping, as he watched for the water in the billy to come to the boil.
"You're wrong," Gleeson retorted. "I tell you the whole thing was bluff. The hole we dug was salted, and the creek was to be salted for a bit; and then, when the rush set in, the news was to have been published and our claim offered for sale, and bought, and offered again, just as the big find was made, the find that was planted in the hole. Only Walker's turned wrong, and Tap, the chap we left to do the salting, has cleared with the gold; and if you hadn't stood by me in the row, I should have cleared too, and left you to get out of the way of the mob as best you could. Only you stood by me and Walker shied, so he can face the mob and the music, and we'll clear. But there's no gold in this creek. There may be a bit in the other; Tap may have dropped some of the stuff we were fools enough to trust with him; but I'll swear he never came here, so how could any gold get here?"
The three stood looking at him, Palmer Billy open-mouthed and open-eyed.
"And you calls yourself a miner?" he said, with scornful emphasis.
"No, I don't," Gleeson retorted. "I'm a mining expert—that's my business. There's money in that; there's none in mining; and I'm after money, if you want to know."
The outspoken frankness of the man momentarily checked the feeling of anger or antagonism that was rising in the minds of the other three. Tony, with the memory of what he had heard in Birralong of the engineers of wild-cat schemes, winced at the discovery that his leader was only a specimen of the tribe after all.
"What's the use of talking? You're after the same lay yourselves," Gleeson went on. "It's money you want, only you haven't got the savee to see the quickest way to get it."
Palmer Billy, his hat at the back of his head and his face working, moved a couple of steps nearer Gleeson.
"See here, young feller," he began. "I'm more than fifty by a long chalk, and I've been mining since I was fifteen; mining, I say—earning every slab of damper and pannikin of tea I've swallerd, not to mention 'bacca and sometimes a bender on rum, by as tough a share of graft as a man wants whose muscles ain't flabby. Fifty times I've struck a duffer on one field or another; twenty times I've struck a good show that petered out in a week; three times I struck it rich—rich enough to set me up if I'd stuck to the find, but always I've been had—had by darned dirty I-talyans from the towns on the coast, who've come up with their glib tongues and doctored tangle-foot and bested me, me and my mates, and shunted us to yacker and graft while they fattened on our find. And for years I've waited for the chance of meeting one of those scabs, just to get a bit even on one of them. There's three of you here, and there's one of me, but——"