While the Billy Boils | Page 7

swung it into the cab, got in himself and hauled the dog
after him.
"You can drive me somewhere where I can leave my swag and dog
while I get some decent clothes to see a tailor in," he said to the cabman.
"My old dog ain't used to cabs, you see."
Then he added, reflectively: "I drove a cab myself, once, for five years
in Sydney."

Stiffner and Jim
(Thirdly, Bill)
We were tramping down in Canterbury, Maoriland, at the time,
swagging it--me and Bill--looking for work on the new railway line.
Well, one afternoon, after a long, hot tramp, we comes to Stiffner's
Hotel--between Christchurch and that other place--I forget the name of
it--with throats on us like sunstruck bones, and not the price of a stick
of tobacco.
We had to have a drink, anyway, so we chanced it. We walked right
into the bar, handed over our swags, put up four drinks, and tried to
look as if we'd just drawn our cheques and didn't care a curse for any
man. We looked solvent enough, as far as swagmen go. We were dirty
and haggard and ragged and tired-looking, and that was all the more
reason why we might have our cheques all right.
This Stiffner was a hard customer. He'd been a spieler, fighting man,
bush parson, temperance preacher, and a policeman, and a commercial
traveller, and everything else that was damnable; he'd been a journalist,
and an editor; he'd been a lawyer, too. He was an ugly brute to look at,
and uglier to have a row with--about six-foot-six, wide in proportion,
and stronger than Donald Dinnie.
He was meaner than a gold-field Chinaman, and sharper than a sewer
rat: he wouldn't give his own father a feed, nor lend him a sprat--unless

some safe person backed the old man's I.O.U.
We knew that we needn't expect any mercy from Stiffner; but
something had to be done, so I said to Bill:
"Something's got to be done, Bill! What do you think of it?"
Bill was mostly a quiet young chap, from Sydney, except when he got
drunk--which was seldom--and then he was a customer, from all round.
He was cracked on the subject of spielers. He held that the population
of the world was divided into two classes--one was spielers and the
other was the mugs. He reckoned that he wasn't a mug. At first I
thought he was a spieler, and afterwards I thought that he was a mug.
He used to say that a man had to do it these times; that he was honest
once and a fool, and was robbed and starved in consequences by his
friends and relations; but now he intended to take all that he could get.
He said that you either had to have or be had; that men were driven to
be sharps, and there was no help for it.
Bill said:
"We'll have to sharpen our teeth, that's all, and chew somebody's lug."
"How?" I asked.
There was a lot of navvies at the pub, and I knew one or two by sight,
so Bill says:
"You know one or two of these mugs. Bite one of their ears.
"So I took aside a chap that I knowed and bit his ear for ten bob, and
gave it to Bill to mind, for I thought it would be safer with him than
with me.
"Hang on to that," I says, "and don't lose it for your natural life's sake,
or Stiffner'll stiffen us."
We put up about nine bob's worth of drinks that night--me and
Bill--and Stiffner didn't squeal: he was too sharp. He shouted once or
twice.
By-and-by I left Bill and turned in, and in the morning when I woke up
there was Bill sitting alongside of me, and looking about as lively as
the fighting kangaroo in London in fog time. He had a black eye and
eighteen pence. He'd been taking down some of the mugs.
"Well, what's to be done now?" I asked. "Stiffner can smash us both
with one hand, and if we don't pay up he'll pound our swags and cripple
us. He's just the man to do it. He loves a fight even more than he hates
being had."

"There's only one thing to be done, Jim," says Bill, in a tired,
disinterested tone that made me mad.
"Well, what's than" I said.
"Smoke!"
"Smoke be damned," I snarled, losing my temper.
"You know dashed well that our swags are in the bar, and we can't
smoke without them.
"Well, then," says Bill, "I'll toss you to see who's to face the landlord."
"Well, I'll be blessed!" I says. "I'll see you further first. You have got a
front. You mugged that stuff away, and you'll