While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson (best value ebook reader .txt) 📕

you’re improving in the funny business. But about the yarn. There was two beds in my room at the pub, where I had to go away without shouting for the boss, and, as it happened, there was a strange chap sleeping in the other bed that night, and, just as I raised the window and was going to lower my bag out, he woke up.

“ ’Now, look here,’ I said, shaking my fist at him, like that, ‘if you say a word, I’ll stoush yer!’

“ ’Well,’ he said, ‘well, you needn’t be in such a sweat to jump down a man’s throat. I’ve got my swag under the bed, and I was just going to ask you for the loan of the rope when you’re done with it.’

“Well, we chummed. His name was Tom⁠—Tom⁠—something, I forget the other name, but it doesn’t matter. Have you got the matches?”

He wasted three matches, and continued⁠—

“There was a lot of old galvanized iron lying about under the window, and I was frightened the swag would make a noise; anyway, I’d have to drop the rope, and that was sure to make a noise. So we agreed for one of us to go down and land the swag. If we were seen going down without the swags it didn’t matter, for we could say we wanted to go out in the yard for something.”

“If you had the swag you might pretend you were walking in your sleep,” I suggested, for the want of something funnier to say.

“Bosh,” said Jack, “and get woke up with a black eye. Bushies don’t generally carry their swags out of pubs in their sleep, or walk neither; it’s only city swells who do that. Where’s the blessed matches?

“Well, Tom agreed to go, and presently I saw a shadow under the window, and lowered away.

“ ’All right?’ I asked in a whisper.

“ ’All right!” whispered the shadow.

“I lowered the other swag.

“ ’All right?’

“ ’All right!’ said the shadow, and just then the moon came out.

“ ’All right!’ says the shadow.

“But it wasn’t all right. It was the landlord himself!

“It seems he got up and went out to the back in the night, and just happened to be coming in when my mate Tom was sneaking out of the back door. He saw Tom, and Tom saw him, and smoked through a hole in the palings into the scrub. The boss looked up at the window, and dropped to it. I went down, funky enough, I can tell you, and faced him. He said:

“ ’Look here, mate, why didn’t you come straight to me, and tell me how you was fixed, instead of sneaking round the trouble in that fashion? There’s no occasion for it.’

“I felt mean at once, but I said: ‘Well, you see, we didn’t know you, boss.’

“ ’So it seems. Well, I didn’t think of that. Anyway, call up your mate and come and have a drink; we’ll talk over it afterwards.’ So I called Tom. ‘Come on,’ I shouted. ‘It’s all right.’

“And the boss kept us a couple of days, and then gave us as much tucker as we could carry, and a drop of stuff and a few bob to go on the track again with.”

“Well, he was white, any road.”

“Yes. I knew him well after that, and only heard one man say a word against him.”

“And did you stoush him?”

“No; I was going to, but Tom wouldn’t let me. He said he was frightened I might make a mess of it, and he did it himself.”

“Did what? Make a mess of it?”

“He made a mess of the other man that slandered that publican. I’d be funny if I was you. Where’s the matches?”

“And could Tom fight?”

“Yes. Tom could fight.”

“Did you travel long with him after that?”

“Ten years.”

“And where is he now?”

“Dead⁠—Give us the matches.”

His Father’s Mate

It was Golden Gully still, but golden in name only, unless indeed the yellow mullock heaps or the bloom of the wattle-trees on the hillside gave it a claim to the title. But the gold was gone from the gully, and the diggers were gone, too, after the manner of Timon’s friends when his wealth deserted him. Golden Gully was a dreary place, dreary even for an abandoned goldfield. The poor, tortured earth, with its wounds all bare, seemed to make a mute appeal to the surrounding bush to come up and hide it, and, as if in answer to its appeal, the shrub and saplings were beginning to close in from the foot of the range. The wilderness was reclaiming its own again.

The two dark, sullen hills that stood on each side were clothed from tip to hollow with dark scrub and scraggy box-trees; but above the highest row of shafts on one side ran a line of wattle-trees in full bloom.

The top of the western hill was shaped somewhat like a saddle, and standing high above the eucalypti on the point corresponding with the pommel were three tall pines. These lonely trees, seen for many miles around, had caught the yellow rays of many a setting sun long before the white man wandered over the ranges.

The predominant note of the scene was a painful sense of listening, that never seemed to lose its tension⁠—a listening as though for the sounds of digger life, sounds that had gone and left a void that was accentuated by the signs of a former presence. The main army of diggers had long ago vanished to new rushes, leaving only its stragglers and deserters behind. These were men who were too poor to drag families about, men who were old and feeble, and men who had lost their faith in fortune. They had dropped unnoticed out of the ranks; and remained to scratch out a living among the abandoned claims.

Golden Gully had its little community of fossickers who lived in a clearing called Spencer’s Flat on one side and Pounding Flat on the other, but they lent no life to the scene; they only haunted