“Often and often, when we were just dropping, and thought it would be a comfort to lie down and die, we would come out of a forest all at once, and feel in a kind of heaven because we saw smoke, or maybe heard the bleating o’ sheep. Heaven? Indeed, Archie, it seemed to be; for we had many a kindly welcome from the roughest-looking chaps you could possibly imagine. And the luxury of bathing our poor feet, with the certainty of a pair of dry, clean socks in the mornin’, made us as happy as a couple of kings. A lump of salt junk, a dab of damper, and a bed in a corner made us feel so jolly we could hardly go to sleep for laughing.
“But the poor beggars we met, how they did carry on to be sure about their bad luck, and about being sold, and this, that, and t’other. Ay, and they didn’t all go back. We saw dead bodies under trees that nobody had stopped to bury; and it was sad enough to notice that a good many of these were women, and such pinched and ragged corpses! It isn’t nice to think back about it.
“Had anybody found gold in this rush? Yes, a few got good working claims, but most of the others stopped till they couldn’t stop any longer, and had to get away east again, crawling, and cursing their fate and folly.
“But I’ll tell you, Archie, what ruined most o’ them. Just drink. It is funny that drink will find its way farther into the bush at times than bread will.
“Well, coming in at the tail o’ the day, like, as Harry and I did, we could spot how matters stood at a glance, and we determined to keep clear of bush hotels. Ah! they call them all hotels. Well, I’m a rough un, Archie, but the scenes I’ve witnessed in some of those drinking houffs has turned my stomach. Maudlin, drunken miners, singing, and blethering, and boasting; fighting and rioting worse than poachers, Archie, and among them—heaven help us!—poor women folks that would melt your heart to look on.
“‘Can we settle down here a bit?’ I said to Harry, when we got to the diggings.
“‘We’ll try our little best, old chum,’ was Harry’s reply.
“And we did try. It was hard even to live at first. The food, such as it was in the new stores, was at famine price, and there was not much to be got from the rivers and woods. But after a few months things mended; our station grew into a kind o’ working town. We had even a graveyard, and all the worst of us got weeded out, and found a place there.
“Harry and I got a claim after no end of prospecting that we weren’t up to. We bought our claim, and bought it cheap; and the chap we got it from died in a week. Drink? Ay, Archie, drink. I’ll never forget, and Harry I don’t think will, the last time we saw him. We had left him in a neighbour’s hut down the gully dying to all appearance, too weak hardly to speak. We bade him ‘good-bye’ for the last time as we thought, and were just sitting and talking like in our slab hut before turning in, and late it must have been, when the door opened, and in came Glutz, that was his name. La! what a sight! His face looked like the face of a skeleton with some parchment drawn tight over it, his hollow eyes glittered like wildfire, his lips were dry and drawn, his voice husky.
“He pointed at us with his shining fingers, and uttered a low cry like some beast in pain; then, in a horrid whisper, he got out these words: