'Poor old Jim, he's a deal too good for the place. Sad mistake this getting married. People should either keep straight or have no relatives to bear the brunt of their villainies. “But, soft,” as they say in the play, “where am I?” I thought I was a virtuous miner again. Here we are at this devil-discovered, demon-haunted old Hollow again—first cousin to the pit of Acheron. There's no help for it, Dick. We must play our parts gallantly, as demons of this lower world, or get hissed off the stage.'
. . . . .
We didn't do much for a few days, you may be sure. There was nothing to do, for one thing; and we hadn't made up our mind what our line was to be. One thing was certain: there would be more row made about us than ever. We should have all the police in the country worried and barked at by the press, the people, the Government, and their superior officers till they got something to show about us. Living at the diggings under the nose of the police, without their having the least suspicion who we were, was bad enough; but the rescue of Jim and the shooting of a policeman in charge of him was more serious—the worst thing that had happened yet.
There would be the devil to pay if they couldn't find a track of us. No doubt money would be spent like water in bribing any one who might give information about us. Every one would be tried that we had ever been known to be friendly with. A special body of men could be told off to make a dart to any spot they might get wind of near where we had been last seen.
We had long talks and barneys over the whole thing—sometimes by ourselves with Starlight, sometimes with father. A long time it was before we settled upon any regular put-up bit of work to do.
Sooner or later we began to see the secret of the Hollow would be found out. There was no great chance in the old times with only a few shepherds and stock-riders wandering through the bush, once in a way straggling over the country. But now the whole colony swarmed with miners, who were always prospecting, as they called it—that is, looking out for fresh patches of gold. Now, small parties of these men—bold, hardy, experienced chaps—would take a pick and shovel, a bucket, and a tin dish, with a few weeks' rations, and scour the whole countryside. They would try every creek, gully, hillside, and river bed. If they found the colour of gold, the least trace of it in a dish of wash-dirt, they would at once settle down themselves. If it went rich the news would soon spread, and a thousand men might be gathered in one spot—the bank of a small creek, the side of a steep range—within a fortnight, with ten thousand more sure to follow within a month.
That might happen at any time on one of the spurs of Nulla Mountain; and the finding out of the track down to the Hollow by some one of the dozens of rambling, shooting, fishing diggers would be as certain to happen as the sun to rise.
Well, the country had changed, and we were bound to change with it. We couldn't stop boxed up in the Hollow day after day, and month after month, shooting and horse-breaking, doing nothing and earning nothing.
If we went outside there were ten times more men looking out for us than ever, ten times more chance of our being tracked or run down than ever. That we knew from the newspapers. How did we see them? Oh, the old way. We sent out our scout, Warrigal, and he got our letters and papers too, from a 'sure hand', as Starlight said the old people in the English wars used to say.
The papers were something to see. First he brought us in a handbill that was posted in Bargo, like this:—