"Fight 'em to deaf!" answered the "pard," growing suddenly cheerful at the prospect of encountering large game. "Is the octopussy like other cats?"
THEY MARCH THROUGH A DENSE JUNGLE.
"It isn't a cat at all; it's a fish like a large spring onion with eyes in, and hundreds of roots which are all alive," explained Stanley, as the expedition moved slowly across the first field.
After a long and painful march over a plain covered with thistles and long grass, succeeded by a dense jungle, the heavily laden "prospectors" reached the beach at a lonely spot some miles to the westward of Southend pier. Here the umbrella tent was erected, the gun reloaded, and the mining utensils carefully unpacked. The loaf was thoughtfully wrapped up in a nightshirt to preserve it from the effect of sun and salt water.
"We must stake out our claim at once," said Stanley, producing four clothes pegs from his pocket, and sticking one at each corner of a four-sided diagram hastily scratched on the sand with a spade. "All miners have to do this before they've been in Klondyke five minutes. And we must put up a notice that this claim belongs to us, so as to keep other gold hunters off. See?"
"Then we shan't have nobody to shoot," protested Lessels, in a disappointed tone.
"Dig up some sand, pard, and fling it into the cinder-sifter while I write out the caution in blue pencil," said Stanley. "And when all the sand has run through call me to pick out the gold."
And after seeing the first spadeful of sand fall into the sieve, the elder miner rapidly produced a notice worded as follows:—
"This is our clame. Tresspasers will be persecuted and shot. Vissitors are requested not to tuch the nugets."