The day after the doctor told me that I could go with the "blind mob," I joined them. These blind people used to carry on a little gardening and other occupations, such as the blind were suited for. And goodness knows what they were not suited for—they could play cards, dice, toss, and all sorts and conditions of things.
I had not been in the camp ten minutes before a notorious character, named "Teddy," came up and said to me: "Come on, come on, we will go and 'shake' some melons!" "Where abouts?" I inquired. "Oh! I'll show you," he answered, "out on the Glebe." Just fancy a man as "blind as a bat" asking me to go stealing melons. "No," I said, "I'm not going to get into any trouble over melons," and he called me all the crawling hounds and scoundrels that he could think of. Shortly afterwards he said to me, "Do you ever kill snakes?" "Not often," I said; "Why, what do you want to know that for?" "Well," he returned, "I want to get a snake's head to put teeth upwards in the overseer's boot—I'll do for him yet." I told him to be careful, or he would pull up on the scaffold.
I soon found out that I had got amongst the biggest lot of thieves and robbers in the place. I became possessed of a few pence, and they knew it. That night I retired, as usual, and put my trousers under my head. As soon as things were quiet the trousers were eased from under my head. I knew it but said nothing, and as soon as they found there was no money in them, back came the pants. I came from London as well as they did, and the money was hidden in a place that they dreamt not of.
This was quite enough of the "blind mob" for me. The next day at dinner time I went up to the boss and told him I would rather go into the road party than stay with thieves.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
The Road Parties.
"More sinned against than sinning."
—Shakespeare.
When a man had finished his sentence in the chain gang, he was sentenced to a road party, and it was Heaven to the chain gang. There was not so much slavery, and it was possible to get a sort of bed to lie down on at night, if it were only a sheet of ti-tree bark. The men got a little more food, too, and they were allowed to cook it themselves; but it was often a straggling piece of meat with about as much fat on it as would grease the eye of a packing-needle. One man always remained to mind the camp while the others were at work, and very often he used to do what was known as "weeding"—that was, taking a little out of each man's allowance of provisions, and then he had a little to sell and get money to buy himself some tea and sugar. But one of them went too far at this game at last and was caught; then there was a fearful uproar. The overseer was going to take him to court straight away, but the other men said they would rather settle it amongst themselves, and this they did by each man giving him three blows on the back with a knotted handkerchief; for if he had been taken to court, he was almost certain to get six months in irons, as the authorities did not believe in the men robbing one another of their food. I gave him three good hits, and the handkerchief used to rebound like India-rubber.
In the road party it was a funny sight to see some of the flash "specials" using a cross-cut saw. Their hands were very soft, and they used to tie pieces of old shirts round the handles at each end to protect them. They generally liked a saw that would 'pinch,' so that they would have an excuse to go to the camp for a maul and wedges to drive into the cut and prevent the pinching; thus they schemed and wasted their time. In the middle of work I often heard them commence to talk about the fine wine they had drank at some of the big inns in London—"The Angel at Islington," "The Hole in the Wall," or "The Elephant and Castle," for instance, and some of them had never tasted wine in their lives. At night they began to 'blow' about how they had done some of the honest merchants in England out of large and small sums of money; but it was a different tale now—they saw very little money in the road party.