After we had been at work a few weeks, Father Backhaus, before stepping down from the packing-case, said:
"I want someone to teach in a school; if there is anyone here willing to do so, I should like to see him after Mass."
I was looking round for Philip among the crowd when he came up, eager and excited.
"I am thinking of going in to speak to the priest about that school," he said. "Would you have any objection? You know we are doing no good in the gully, but I won't leave itif you think I had better not."
Philip was honourable; he would not dissolve our short partnership, and leave me alone unless I was quite willing to let him go.
"Have you ever kept school before?"
"No, never. But I don't think the teaching will give me much trouble. There can't be many children around here, and I can surely teach them A B C and the Catechism."
Although I thought he had not given fortune a fair chance to bless us, he looked so wistful and anxious that I had not the heart to say no. Philip went into the tent, spoke to the priest, and became a schoolmaster. I was then a solitary "hatter."
Next day a man came up the gully with a sack on his back with something in it which he had found in a shaft. He thought the shaft had not been dug down to the bedrock, and he would bottom it. He bottomed on a corpse. The claim had been worked during the previous summer by two men. One morning there was only one man on it; he said his mate had gone to Melbourne, but he had in fact killed him during the night, and dropped him down the hole. The police never hunted out that murderer; they were too busy hunting us.
I was not long alone. A beggarly looking young man came a few days later, and said: