There is no road, of course. Our way lies across a country jungled with fern and scrub and bush. The ground is broken with abrupt descents and short but rugged rises. There are streams and marshes to be plunged through or jumped over. There are devious twists and turns to be made to avoid insurmountable obstacles. Scarce is there a track to show the way, merely the faintest indication of one cut through the wooded tracts by the surveyor's gang. And we have six miles and more to make, riding with frantic eagerness and reckless speed, conscious that two thousand men have entered for the race, and that only a few can win.
Thoroughly well mounted, and accustomed from our cattle-driving experiences to such rough riding as this, we four chums do justice to the start we managed to get. Not more than a score or so are ahead of us, and some of them we are overhauling.
There are dozens of casualties, of course. As we gallop along I see a man and horse go down, on the steep side of a gully. They roll over together, and together flounder to the bottom. The unlucky rider screams with pain, for his legs and ribs are broken, and calls to us to help him. We hesitate half a moment, but the gold-fever is on us, and we hurry on. At such a time humanity is dead, even in the most honourable breast. It is like a battle.
Again, Dandy Jack and O'Gaygun are in front of me. Before them rides a regular Thames miner, bestriding a lean and weedy horse of very poor description. It is easy to see, too, that he is not accustomed to the saddle, though he is urging his beast to its utmost, and doing all he knows to get on. We are coursing along the side of a slope, dense ti-tree jungle above and below us, and only a rough narrow way through it. The miner's horse ahead stumbles and trips, grows frightened, and becomes unmanageable, turning broadside on in the narrow path and blocking it.
I hear Dandy Jack and O'Gaygun shout in warning, but the miner has no time to get out of their way. Riding abreast they charge down upon him, utterly regardless of consequences. Over goes horse and man beneath the shock of their rushing steeds, and, a moment later, my nag leaps over the fallen and follows at their heels.
Oh, the rush and fury of that ride! My head still swims as I think of it. All sense of care is gone; all thought of risk or accident banished. A wild, mad excitement surges through every vein, and boils up within my brain. I only know that hundreds are hurrying after me, and before me there is a dazzle and glitter of gold. Who heeds the fallen, the vanquished, the beaten in the race? Who cares for peril to life or limb? There is but one idea the mind can hold—on! on!
By-and-by, and when our panting, foaming horses seem utterly giving out, responding neither to voice nor spur, bit nor whip, we find ourselves within the Gorge. A splendid mountain scene is that, had we but time to look at it. We have not. Our worn-out steeds carry us wearily up and along the steep hill-side, beneath and among the trees that cast their umbrage all over the golden ground. Climbing, struggling, pressing ever onward, we pass the grim defile, and, in the wild and beautiful solitude of primeval nature, we find our goal.
Through the trees we spy a clearing, lying open and sunlit on the steep mountain-side. A clearing, hardly to be so designated, for it is merely a space of some few acres where fallen, half-burnt trees lie prostrate, jumbled in inextricable confusion with boulders, rocks, jutting crags, and broken mounds of fresh-turned soil and stone. A handkerchief upon a post, some newly-split and whitened stakes set here and there around the débris, the babble and vociferation of men, those who have got before us, around and about, all sufficiently proclaims that our race is at an end, and that this before us is the prospectors' claim.
There is no time to be lost, for many behind us are coming on, and will be upon the ground a few minutes later. And more and more are coming, pressing onward from the rear with feverish ardour. We spring from our now useless steeds and hasten to select our ground. Above, and on each side, nay, even immediately below the prospectors' claim, those lucky first ones are already pegging out their lawful areas. Depending on certain indications that a hasty glance reveals, and on advice that Dandy Jack has previously received in mysterious confidence from one of the prospectors, we pass below the ground already seized, and there, a little to the right, we proceed to set up the stakes and clear the ground that we claim as ours.