“Halloa, boys! have you room for me?”
They were too much taken aback to reply immediately, and then one of them said—
“Oh yes; come and sit down.”
As I seated myself among them they asked—
“Have you been out prospecting?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, “and I have been away a very long time.”
“And where did you leave your mates?” was the next question.
“I had no mates,” I told them. “I undertook my wanderings practically alone.”
They looked at one another, winked, and smiled incredulously at this. Then one of them asked me if I had found any gold.
I said, “Oh yes, plenty of gold,” and then the next query—a most natural one—was, “Well, why have you not brought some of the stuff back with you? How far have you travelled?”