"No. To Brisbane. That didn't cost anything."
"You hadn't any friends?"
"No. I got into a billet near Stanthorpe, but when I wanted a raise they sacked me and got another boy. Then I came across to New South Wales. It wasn't any use staying in Queensland. I wish I'd stayed in England," he added.
"How's that?"
"I can't get work. I wouldn't mind if I could get a job but it's pretty hard when you can't."
"Can't you get work?"
"I haven't done a stroke for ten weeks."
"Well, are you hard up?" enquired Ned, to whose bush experience ten weeks out-of-work meant nothing.
"Look here," returned the lad, touching the front of his white shirt and the cuffs. Ned saw that what he had taken for white flannel in the dim candle-light was white linen, guileless of starch, evidently washed in a hand-basin at night and left to dry over a chair till morning. "A man's pretty hard up—ain't he?—when he can't get his shirt laundried."
"That's bad," said Ned, sympathetically, determining to sympathise a pound-note. Starched shirts did not count to him personally but he understood that the town and the bush were very different.