“Faix, it’s the crathur’s way o’ divartin’ himself,” said the police-sergeant, who had stopped for a few minutes to hear his own creed anathematized; “and a mighty queer kind o’ divarsion it is, to my thinkin’.”
The sergeant, when spoken to about the attempted robbery, instantly recognized the mulatto.
“It’s that thief o’ the worruld, Baltimor-r-e Ben. That’s who it is entirely. They call him Baltimor-r-e Ben becase he came from Mel-bour-r-ne. He’ll lie dar-ruk for a bit afthur this, but we’ll have him, sir-r; an’ if we won’t, the digger bhoys will string him up if they catch him. An’ was it the young gintlemen settled the other bla’guards? More power to their elbows! You should have kicked him on the shins, sir-r. A neegur’s head’s as harrud to crack as an Irishman’s.”
At Wonga-Wonga, as well as by the Jim Crow Creek police-sergeant, Harry and Donald were considered great heroes, when their exploits were told there. If Mrs. Lawson had had her way, however, neither her husband nor the boys would ever have gone to Jim Crow Creek again. Once more, nevertheless, they drove stock over thither. And then, suddenly, the place was deserted by all except a few Chinese fossickers, who mysteriously made a living out of claims which Europeans had thrown up as not worth a speck. The tide of diggers rolled back to Sydney, cursing the storekeepers as they went. Some waves of the tide crept rather than rolled, and some of the tide never got back. There was misery, sickness, starvation, at Jim Crow Creek and along the road; but sundry storekeepers had balanced their ledgers greatly to their satisfaction.
“Those miners ought to be ’cute enough by this time to take care of themselves,” said Harry, when he was talking over the matter; “but still it does seem an infested shame that they should be done so. I wish Hargreaves had never come back from California. I don’t see what gold has done for the colony, except spoilt the runs and run up shepherds’ wages.”
“Ah, that is how you Boys in the Bush talk,” said Miss Smith, who had recently returned from Sydney.
“Miss Smith,” replied Harry, majestically, “I no longer consider myself a Boy in the Bush.”
THE END.
Transcriber’s Notes
- Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication.
- In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)
- Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.