‘I shall never feel like that, mother!’ said the boy feelingly. ‘Don’t make any mistake.’

. . . . . . . . .

The eventful step was fully carried out; a [93] ]comfortable house in one of the picturesque suburbs of Sydney was rented and furnished; the father’s farewells were made—those adieus sometimes temporary, but which the heart is prone to suggest may be eternal; and as the mail-boat majestically moved on her course through the great sandstone gates of the landlocked haven, the tears fell fast from the eyes of more than one of the little party as her smoke faded from view behind the lofty headland.

. . . . . . . . .

Again the week-long voyage—the sighting of the far western ports—the hasty landing—the railway crowding—the short stay at Perth—the uneventful, uninteresting overland journey through country which nothing but the possession of goldfields could render interesting, though occasionally touching upon patches more or less agricultural or pastoral. The motley crowd of pilgrims to the Mecca of Mammon was indeed a medley, as are all goldfields crusades. Runaway sailors, deserting soldiers, shepherds, stockriders, navvies, nobodies, gentlemen ‘formerly in the army,’ Cambridge and Oxford graduates, ex-Queensland squatters—some with two horses, some with a packhorse only, but by far the greater number depending entirely upon the all-sufficing ‘bluey’ (or blue blanket) carried on the shoulders, and containing the owner’s food, wardrobe, cooking utensils, and worldly possessions generally. Southern Cross, a year-old town, was not materially different in architecture, dust, flies, banks, and blasphemy, from ‘rushes’ with which the Commissioner had [94] ]been familiar, only ‘more so,’ perhaps—every discomfort and departure from civilised life being strongly accentuated. A much-begrudged hour or two was spent, or rather wasted here, and through the clear, starlit night the expedition pushed silently onward. Taking counsel of past experience, the leader had left little to the chances of the journey. He had provided a substantial waggonette, heavier than the first vehicle in which he and old Waters had travelled to the Pilot Mount; a forty-gallon cask for water—a good-sized condenser, in case they ran short of the indispensable element—chaff and oats sufficient for their four horses, with tinned meat and fish to ensure a variety of ‘cuisine’; rifles, repeaters, and double-barrels, with revolvers in good order, and plenty of ammunition; also a fair-sized tent, with folding-table and seats, as a lengthened stay at the claim, which was now a certainty, would need these accessories for reasonable comfort, now that there was no doubt of the reef being permanent, rich, wide, and going down equally so—indeed better the deeper it went down. After leaving Southern Cross the desert journey recommenced, but now there was no difficulty in finding the road. Every kind of track was printed in large type upon the broad sheet of the Waste. Carts and waggons, horses and bullock teams, had been there. The camels, following one behind the other, had left their soft, narrow paths through sand-hill and spinifex plain, salt lake and clay pan. This they could note as they went through mulga and low acacia scrub until Pilot Hill, as [95] ]the eminence had been named, was sighted. Some of the ‘soaks’ emptied by the horses and camel trains had not refilled, but their reserve of cask water stood well to them in temporary need. And after a journey neither protracted nor arduous, they greeted old Jack and Southwater, who had managed to put up a comfortable shanty, and pointed proudly to a ‘township’ of tents, and hessian edifices, occupying a considerable stretch of country.

Great congratulations greeted them from the resident partners, and much curiosity was expressed as to the nature of the supplies which they had brought with them, as well as of those which were to follow on, with the machinery, and all the component parts of the up-to-date plant, which were even now on the road. As the prospectors and shareholders in the Reward Claim, they were objects of respectful admiration, and praised in the local newspapers for endurance, high intelligence, courage, all sorts of heroic qualities—the whole finished off with the golden crown of success, which never fails to irradiate the wearer and his surroundings.

Awaking from his humble but not uncomfortable couch in the tent, which had been pitched without loss of time, Arnold Banneret gazed around the wide expanse with grateful and, indeed, enviable feelings. Here was, if not the goal of his ambition, a near approach to it. He had neared the winning-post, and though the trophy had not as yet been placed in his hands, there was no moral doubt that he would shortly be in possession [96] ]of the coveted prize—and what a prize it would be! Well worth the toil, the risk, the anxiety which he had gone through, the years of hard work—sometimes indeed pressing closely upon his powers of mind and body. With but a moderate income, he had cheerfully faced the task of providing for the wants of a large family. They had been fed and clothed, educated and prepared for their station in life as gentlefolk. At times there had been but the narrowest margin—at times painful doubt, depressing anxiety.

But the parents had never despaired. A gleam of hope—a ray of sunshine even when skies were darkest—had never failed to illumine the path. One of the partners in the social-personal-national enterprise (it is unnecessary to inquire which) had never faltered or swerved from the solemn contract; and now, after years of doubt and struggle, the goal was won. Success was assured—it was almost a moral certainty,—a life-long provision for him and his, an assured position, a name and fame, even distinction, for all their future life. As he stood before his tent door and watched the red-gold sun invade the unclouded firmament, when the morning mists, unlike the heavier masses of more favoured climes, made haste to disperse and disappear, he could have fancied himself an Arab sheikh. There were no Bedouins within sight, a fact on which he congratulated himself. But a long line of camels with their turbaned drivers, coming ‘up from the under world,’ supplied proof that the desert conditions were not wholly, absolutely non-existent.

[97]
]How differently indeed the point of view adds to or subtracts from the treatment of any given situation. To the famished explorer with beaten horses or starving camels, how drear and terrible the outlook over the ‘sun-scorched desert, wild and bare’—the stunted shrubs, the stony surface, the arid waste! Weak and low, faint with hunger, or frantic with thirst, he can barely summon sufficient energy to make one last effort for the hidden spring and—life.

Here, before the Commissioner, lay the same landscape—but for the scattered huts and tents, as carelessly distributed over the forlorn levels as if they had been rained down from the sky in some abnormal storm-burst. Yet the man in front of the tent saw so much besides the dusky levels—the stunted, colourless copses, with their distorted, dwarfish acacia trees—the restless team and saddle horses crowding around the drays as if imploring provender, too sensible of the sterility of the land to waste time in wandering on a vain search for pasture. The risen sun, which so many a fainting straggler cursed, as the red globe rose higher through the pitiless firmament, was to him the symbol of honour and happiness to come. The far distance, in which a pale mist shrouded the naked rocks and scarred cliffs of a barrier range, was grandly mysterious in his eyes, as concealing treasure untold. The bells which now commenced to mingle and blend as the teams came in, or were driven towards the Pilot Mount, clanged and jangled not without a certain rude melody. An occasional flight of waterfowl on their way to the [98] ]coast, or a far inland lake, passed in swaying files high overhead—guided, who shall say by what course of reasoning or memory, to river, mere, or lake? And like the historic mariner, his heart went out to the birds, and ‘he blessed them unawares.’ His heart, full of joy and thankfulness, was softened by the relief from care which had been granted to him, and he wished well to all living things. The day which began with the sun’s blessing on him and his, so to speak, continued and ended with the same—in strict consonance with the feelings of the principal shareholder in the ‘Last Chance,’ now far heralded as a treasure claim. As the sun rose high and yet higher at mid-day, and lingeringly dwelt up crag and hollow, sand waste and scrub, until the utmost limit of his course, it was more or less oppressive to the crowd of toilers, who had worked since dawn. But what of that? The air was dry, fresh, and, to the unworn constitutions of the greater number of the workers on ‘the field,’ invigorating. There was no hint of enervating moisture in the heated air which the north wind sent along, in steady waves, from the innermost deserts. Clothing was of the lightest possible texture, and as little of it as conventions would allow—though here, as in all Australian congregations, when leisure and recreation cried truce to the excitement of toil, the canons of British taste were observed. And in favour of the climate, which had no tropical disabilities or defects, the nights—inestimable blessing—were cool.