While the Billy Boils | Page 2

talk of past diggers' mistakes, and second bottoms, and feelers, and
dips, and leads--also outcrops--and absently pick up pieces of quartz
and slate, rub them on their sleeves, look at them in an abstracted
manner, and drop them again; and they would talk of some old lead
they had worked on: "Hogan's party was here on one side of us,
Macintosh was here on the other, Mac was getting good gold and so

was Hogan, and now, why the blanky blank weren't we on gold?" And
the mate would always agree that there was "gold in them ridges and
gullies yet, if a man only had the money behind him to git at it." And
then perhaps the guv'nor would show him a spot where he intended to
put down a shaft some day--the old man was always thinking of putting
down a shaft. And these two old fifty-niners would mooch round and
sit on their heels on the sunny mullock heaps and break clay lumps
between their hands, and lay plans for the putting down of shafts, and
smoke, till an urchin was sent to "look for his father and Mr So-and-so,
and tell 'em to come to their dinner."
And again--mostly in the fresh of the morning--they would hang about
the fences on the selection and review the live stock: five dusty
skeletons of cows, a hollow-sided calf or two, and one shocking piece
of equine scenery--which, by the way, the old mate always praised. But
the selector's heart was not in farming nor on selections--it was far
away with the last new rush in Western Australia or Queensland, or
perhaps buried in the worked-out ground of Tambaroora, Married
Man's Creek, or Araluen; and by-and-by the memory of some
half-forgotten reef or lead or Last Chance, Nil Desperandum, or Brown
Snake claim would take their thoughts far back and away from the
dusty patch of sods and struggling sprouts called the crop, or the few
discouraged, half-dead slips which comprised the orchard. Then their
conversation would be pointed with many Golden Points, Bakery Hill,
Deep Creeks, Maitland Bars, Specimen Flats, and Chinamen's Gullies.
And so they'd yarn till the youngster came to tell them that "Mother sez
the breakfus is gettin' cold," and then the old mate would rouse himself
and stretch and say, "Well, we mustn't keep the missus waitin', Tom!"
And, after tea, they would sit on a log of the wood-heap, or the edge of
the veranda--that is, in warm weather--and yarn about Ballarat and
Bendigo--of the days when we spoke of being on a place oftener than at
it: on Ballarat, on Gulgong, on Lambing Flat, on _Creswick_--and they
would use the definite article before the names, as: "on The Turon; The
Lachlan; The Home Rule; The Canadian Lead." Then again they'd yarn
of old mates, such as Tom Brook, Jack Henright, and poor Martin
Ratcliffe--who was killed in his golden hole--and of other men whom
they didn't seem to have known much about, and who went by the
names of "Adelaide Adolphus," "Corney George," and other names

which might have been more or less applicable.
And sometimes they'd get talking, low and mysterious like, about "Th'
Eureka Stockade;" and if we didn't understand and asked questions,
"what was the Eureka Stockade?" or "what did they do it for?" father'd
say: "Now, run away, sonny, and don't bother; me and Mr So-and-so
want to talk." Father had the mark of a hole on his leg, which he said he
got through a gun accident when a boy, and a scar on his side, that we
saw when he was in swimming with us; he said he got that in an
accident in a quartz-crushing machine. Mr So-and-so had a big scar on
the side of his forehead that was caused by a pick accidentally slipping
out of a loop in the rope, and falling down a shaft where he was
working. But how was it they talked low, and their eyes brightened up,
and they didn't look at each other, but away over sunset, and had to get
up and walk about, and take a stroll in the cool of the evening when
they talked about Eureka?
And, again they'd talk lower and more mysterious like, and perhaps
mother would be passing the wood-heap and catch a word, and asked:
"Who was she, Tom?"
And Tom--father--would say:
"Oh, you didn't know her, Mary; she belonged to a family Bill knew at
home."
And Bill would look solemn till mother had gone, and then they would
smile a quiet smile, and stretch and say, "Ah, well!" and start
something else.
They had yarns for the fireside, too, some of those old mates of our
father's, and one of them would often tell how a girl--a queen of