“He certainly looks like one,” said Blount, glancing over the fine figure and regular features of the tall, handsome Tasmanian. “If the other gentleman who makes up the syndicate is a match for him, we should be an efficient quartette.”
“Clarke is a light-weight,” said Tregonwell, “but as wiry as a dingo, besides being the eminent mining expert of the party (of course, when I’m away); but he’s perhaps more up to date, as when he went to California he learned the latest wrinkles in silver-mining. He’s rather an invalid at present, having jarred his right hand with a pick, and sprained his left ankle in taking a walk through this ‘merry greenwood,’ as old writers called the forest.”
“I thought I had seen some rough country in New South Wales,” said Blount, “but this tops anything I have ever seen or indeed heard of, except an African jungle.”
“Climate not quite so bad, no fever yet,” replied Herbert, “but can’t say much for the Queen’s Highway. However, the silver’s all right, and where that’s the case, anything else follows in good time. But, come inside—no horses to want feeding, luckily, as the oats which came in advance, cost a guinea a bucket.”
So saying, he led the way to a small but not uncomfortable hut, at one side of which a fire of logs was blazing in a huge stone chimney. The walls of this rude dwelling were composed of the trunk of the black fern tree, placed vertically in the ground, the interstices being filled up with a compost of mud and twigs, which formed a wind and waterproof wall, while it lasted. On one of the rude couches lay a man, who excused himself from rising on the score of a sprained ankle.
“It’s so confoundedly painful,” he said, “that even standing gives me fits. Of all the infernal, brutal, God-forsaken holes, that ever a man’s evil genius lured him into, this is the worst and most villanous. In California, the Tasmanians and Cornstalks were looked on as criminals and occasionally lynched as such, but you could walk out in daylight and were not made a pack-horse of. If I were this gentleman, whom I see Tregonwell has enticed here under false pretences, I should hire a Chinaman to carry me back to Strahan, and bring an action against him as soon as I reached Hobart.”
“I’m afraid he’s delirious, Mr. Blount,” said Herbert, soothingly, “and as he’s lost a leg and an arm, so to speak, we can’t hammer him at present, but he’s not a bad chap, when he’s clothed and in his right mind. In the meantime, as a fellow-countryman, I apologise for him.”
“Don’t believe a word these monomaniacs tell you, Mr. Blount,” said the sufferer, trying to raise himself on one arm, and subsiding with a groan. “Herbert’s an absurd optimist, and Tregonwell—well, we know what Cousin Jacks are. However, after supper, I daresay I shall feel better. Do you happen to have a late paper about you?”
“Several,” said Blount, “which I hadn’t time to read before we left, including a Weekly Times.”
“In that case,” said the pessimist, “I retract much of what I have said. I have read everything they have here, and thought I was stranded in the wilderness without food, raiment, or pabulum mentis. Now I descry a gleam of hope.”