"If you'd been through the things I've been through," I asserted, "if you'd been in New Guinea when there was a gold-strike on and had to climb hundreds of feet up a straight cliff to get to the fields, hanging on all the time to creepers as thick as your wrist, you'd think this was just Paradise. If you'd been with me in the sweltering Solomon Island jungle, where every breath you took made the perspiration stand out on your forehead in big beads, or up in the Klondyke when it was fifty below and a man's own breath turned into ice about his mouth, you'd know what life really meant. Here you're in the Garden of Victoria; you see sights that knock some of the beauty spots of the world into a cocked hat, and all you can do is growl at the country. You can't expect to go up and down the mountain side in a lift or anything of the sort."
"It's all very well for you to talk like that," he objected. "You're used to this kind of life; we're not. That makes all the difference."
"So it seems," I said. "But I haven't the slightest intention of giving in yet. As a matter of fact I rather think we've been a little too sure that we were on the right track. We haven't been as careful as we might. We've gone along blindly."
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Just this. We've been so infernally confident that we only had to find a clump of wattle and a lone tree, and we were there. Now that lone tree must be somewhere on the east side of the valley, and, despite the fact that it's on high ground, it's so hidden that we wouldn't see it until we were almost on top of it. It might be perfectly visible from inside the valley, and at the same time be hidden from the outside by another hill. As for the wattle, has it ever struck you that wattle only begins to spring into bloom about the end of August? It's almost April now, and you wouldn't find anything but just a mass of green bushes."
"If there was a valley, which same I'm beginning to doubt," Cumshaw said doggedly, "we'd have found it before this."
"I don't know what Miss Drummond is cooking for our tea," I remarked irrelevantly, "but it smells good."
"If you think you can put me off that way," Cumshaw said, "you're mighty mistaken. I'm tired of it all, and for two pins——"
"You know very well," I cut in, "that I haven't one pin, let alone two."
"You apparently don't understand that I'm perfectly serious."