IN THE ROARING FIFTIES

By

EDWARD DYSON
1906




I

THE night was bright and cool, and the old East Indiaman moved slowly on
the heaving bosom of the ocean, under a strong full moon, like a
wind-blown ghost to whose wanderings there had been no beginning and
could be no end--so small, so helpless she seemed between the two
infinities of sea and sky. There was no cloud to break the blue
profundity of heaven, no line of horizon, no diversity in the long lazy
roll of the green waters to dispel the illusion of an interminable ocean.
The great crestless waves rose and fell with pulsing monotony, round,
smooth and intolerably silent. It was as if the undulating sea had been
stricken motionless, and the ship was damned to the Sisyphean task of
surmounting one mysterious hill that eternally reappeared under her prow,
and beyond which she might never pass. Suddenly the ghost faltered on the
crest of a wave, fluttering her rags in the moonlight, possessed with a
vague indecision. Shouting and the noise of hurrying feet broke the
silence. There was a startling upheaval of men; they swarmed in the
rigging, and faces were piled above the larboard bulwarks. A boat dropped
from the ship's side, striking the sea with a muffled sound, and was
instantly caught into the quaint lifting and falling motion of the
Francis Cadman, as the oily-backed waves slid under. Four men in the boat
bent smartly to the oars, a fifth stood erect in the prow, peering under
his hand over the waste of waters; another at the tiller encouraged the
rowers with cordial and well-meant abuse. A hundred people shouted futile
directions from the ship. The gravity of the Indian Ocean was disturbed
by the babble of dialects. One voice rose above all the rest, sonorous,
masterful, cursing the ship into order with a deliberate flow of
invective that had the dignity and force of a judgment.

The boat drew off rapidly. The men, squarely and firmly seated, bent
their heavy shoulders with machine-like movements, and when they threw
back their faces the rays of the moon glittered and flashed in their
dilated eyes and on their bared teeth. The sailor at the tiller swayed in
unison, and grunted encouragement, breaking every now and then into
bitter speech, spoken as if in reverent accord with the night and their
mission, in a low, pleading tone, much as a patient mother might address
a wayward child.

'Lift her, lads--lift her, blast you! Oh, my blighted soul, Ellis! I'd
get more square-pullin' out of a starved cat with ten kittens--I would,
by thunder! Now, men, all together! Huh! Huh! hub!'

The boatswain strained as if tugging a stubborn oar. In the interval of
silence that followed all bent attentive ears, but no call came from the
sea. The sleek oars dipped into the waves without a sound, and swung
noiselessly in the worn rowlocks. The man at the prow remained rigid as a
statue, and Coleman resumed his whispered invocation.

'Bend to it, you devils! One! two! three! Morton, don't go to sleep, you
swine! Ryan! Tadvers, you herrin'-gutted, boss-eyed son of a barber's
ape, are you rowin' or spoonin' up hot soup? Pull, men! Huh! That's a
clinker! Huh! Shift her! Huh! May the fiend singe you for a drowsy pack
o' sea-cows! Pull!'

The men threw every ounce of power into each stroke, the voice of the
boatswain blending with their efforts like an intoned benediction, and
the treacly sea foamed under the prow into drifted snow which ran merrily
in their wake. For a tense moment the boat hung poised upon a high
roller, as if about to be projected into the air, and the man in the
prow, electrified, threw out an arm with a dramatic gesture. The
instincts of the ex-whaler triumphed in that moment of excitement.

'There she blows!'

Instantly Coleman fell into a condition of profound agitation; he poured
out a lava-flow of vituperation upon the heads of his men; he cursed them
for weaklings and waster and hissed phrases shameful to them and
discreditable to their parents. The crew increased their stroke. Already
the perspiration was streaming from their indurated hides; their wet
faces and breasts glistened in the night. Every now and again the
look-out, discovering a black spot where the moon's rays splashed a
smooth-backed wave with silver, uttered an inarticulate cry that struck
the men like a spur, and all the time his pointing hand was a finger-post
to the steersman.

Meanwhile the object of this chase, a fragile, white-faced girl, had
fought with the mammoth waves as with inveterate beasts seeking to stifle
her in icy embraces. A mere atom plunged in their depths as in cavernous
and boundless darkness, she had struggled with an ocean the whole of the
focus of which were leagued against her, possessed all the time with a
foolish and trivial remembrance of child hood, the vision of a little
gray kitten, with a weight about its neck, striving to beat its way up
through clear waters, sending out tiny bubbles of crystal that danced in
mockery of its dying.

On the surface she was swung across seeming great distances, till a
strong arm out of the night and the vastness of things seized her, and
the tension of the struggle passed from her limbs, leaving a sense of
appeasement as sweet as sleep. She heard a man's voice directing her, and
obeyed without understanding. Now the sea supported her like a soft and
pleasant bed, she had no fear and little consciousness. A few stern words
buzzed in her head like bees--'Sink your arms! Don't try to breathe when
we're under! Keep your mouth shut!' They were very absurd: they could
have nothing to do with her; but she had heard them somewhere, and she
obeyed.

The man lay well back in the water, with little more than his chin and
lips above the surface, his left hand, twisted in the woman's hair,
rested in the nape of her neck, sustaining her with scarcely an effort.
An ocean swimmer from his early boyhood, great waters had no terrors for
him, and when he found the drowning girl he knew that all would be well,
provided the ship's boats were successful in their search.

The girl was very tractable: she lay perfectly still. He looked into her
pale face; her eyes were wide open, staring straight up at the feeble
stars. Every minute or so he cried aloud, or whistled a shrill call
between his teeth, but the action did not disturb the flow of his
thoughts. Despite the peculiarity of his position, he had drifted into a
strange mood of introspection. Why had he done this thing? What was the
girl to him that at the first sight of her danger he should have
forgotten his philosophy of self, his pride in his contempt for his kind,
and his fine aloofness? She was no more in his life than any other of the
four hundred strangers on board. The act of leaping into the sea had been
a mere impulse, the prompting of an unsuspected instinct. She might hate
his race, but he was still its slave. All his life he had been an
Ishmael, feared and disliked; humankind had given him only cause to hate
and despise it, and yet blood remained stronger than belief when a human
life was in peril. The young man laughed, and the boat's from the Francis
Cadman, drawing near, heard the mocking laughter and ceased rowing,
chilled with a superstitious terror.

'Good God!' cried the look-out, 'there's two of 'em.'

The sailors turned in their seats, staring in stupid awe at two heads
clearly visible in the moonlight that lay like silver gossamer on the
dark green sea--two heads where they had expected to find but one. The
boatswain, frozen in the forward movement of his swing, glared
open-mouthed, speechless; he felt his stiff hair stirring strangely under
his hat, a pronounced uneasiness moved in the boat. Only one woman had
fallen from the ship, and here, out in the deep trough of the lone sea,
they found two creatures, and one laughed eerily. Sailormen believed in
many awesome mysteries: ghosts and goblins peopled the ocean like a vast
graveyard. The boat held off, and no man spoke, but Ryan shivered under
his skin, and fumbled his memory for the name of a potent saint.

'Ahoy, there!' cried the young man impatiently; but winning no response,
he swam slowly to meet the boat as she drifted. He raised the girl, and
one of the men seized her mechanically, and drew her limp form from the
water. No hand was offered to the rescuer, but as the boat lifted he
seized her prow, and drew himself aboard. All eyes were upon him, staring
dubiously.

'Divil take me if it ain't the Hermit!' gasped Ryan, with an expiration
of intense relief.

Coleman's stony expression instantly relaxed, he recovered himself with a
jerk of the bead.

'Well,' he murmured bitterly, 'of all the stuck pigs! What the blue fury
're ye all sittin' garpin' at like a lot o' demented damn kelpies? Give
way there! How's the young lady, Smith?'

'She don' seem perticler bad,' answered Smith doubtfully. He was
struggling to wrap his charge in a length of stiff, crackling sailcloth,
puzzled by the white face of the girl.

Coleman looked sharply at the young man, who was seated on the gunwale,
but, discovering no encouragement in his set face and careless eyes,
repressed his curiosity, and devoted himself to the task of overhauling
the Francis Cadman. It was a long and trying job, but he accomplished it
without having exhausted his eloquence. Indeed, his terms of endearment
had been cautiously selected throughout, out of a heroic respect for the
lady passenger. The boatswain's idea of language becoming in the presence
of the gentler sex was rather liberal, perhaps; but in any case his nice
consideration was wasted upon the girl, who heard never a word. She lay
as if in the grip of fever, her distorted mind pursuing quaint visions
and trifling and irrelevant ideas. As they drew near, the rescue-party
sent out a breathless cheer, which was answered from the ship with a wild
yell of exultation, and then a broadside of questions burst from the deck
of the Francis Cadman, where every creature on board excitedly awaited
the boat's return. The sonorous and masterful voice enforced silence
again with a sentence.

'How is it, bo's'n?' called the same voice a moment later.

'Got 'em both, sir,' answered Coleman.

'Both!'

'Ay, ay, sir!'

A tumult of voices surged over the ship again; the heads piled themselves
afresh, craning one above the other. Two had gone overboard! Only one had
been reported, and one only was missed. Interest was doubled. For four
weeks the Francis Cadman had been pottering about the Indian Ocean
without discovering a single adventure to break the stupid monotony of
sky and sea, and restore the faith of the passengers in their favourite
maritime authors; but here, at last, was a sensation and a mystery.

Perhaps, after all, it was no mere accident, but a tragedy. Men and women
thronged the deck, thrilling with sympathy, and yet secretly hoping for a
complete drama, even though someone must suffer.

The girl was first passed up. When the young man followed she had been
carried below. He was barefooted, and clad only in singlet and trousers;
his coat and shirt had been discarded in the sea.

Ryan's expression sprang from every tongue.

'The Hermit!'

The young man stood with his shoulders to the gunwale, facing the crowd.
There was something resentful in his attitude. His face was that of a man
about twenty-two, beardless and boyish, but the firm, straight mouth,
with its compressed, slightly protuberant lips, and the thick line of
dark brows, throwing the eyes into shadows, imparted an appearance of
sullen reserve that belonged to an older face. His scrutiny condemned men
and repelled them. His figure, about three inches above middle height,
was that of a labourer whose strength was diffused through the limbs by
swift and subtle exercise. There was nothing rugged in his powerful
outline, and every attitude had an architectural suggestion of strength.

Captain Evan peered at the youth closely, and not without a hint of
suspicion. 'Your name's Done, isn't it?' he said.

The Hermit nodded shortly.

'How did all this happen, my man?'

'I was leaning on the gunnel by the main-chains when I heard a cry and a
splash, and saw the girl's body past. I dropped in after her.'

'You saved her life, then?'

'I helped her to keep afloat till the boat reached us.'

'Good boy!' Captain Evan put out his hand as if with the intention of
giving Done an approving pat on the shoulder, but the young man turned
away abruptly, thrusting himself through the men, who had clustered
around him muttering diffident compliments, and endeavouring to shake him
by the hand.

'Blast it all, don't maul a man about!' said the hero sulkily, and the
crowd made way for him.

Below Jim Done stripped hastily, wrung out his wet clothes upon the
littered floors and climbed into his bunk, threatening to tear down a
whole terrace of the crazy structures as he did so.

The Francis Cadman was not ordinarily a passenger boat: she was
commissioned to carry two hundred and fifty sailors to the ships left
helpless in Corio Bay and Hobson's Bay, deserted by their crews, who, in
spite of official strategies, had fled to the diggings immediately after
anchors were dropped in Victorian waters.

The accommodation for the men was the roughest imaginable. Bunks of
unplaned timber were strung up in tiers under the forecastle, and
wherever space could be found for them in the dark and musty depths of
the ship. A few second-class male passengers shared these delectable
quarters with the sailors, and the Francis Cadman had secured a
complement of first-class patrons willing to pay exorbitant prices for
the dubious comforts and plain fare of the 'cabin' passage.

The gold lust was burning in the blood of Europe. Fabulous stories of
Australian treasures were flying about the nations; greedy ears drank
them in, and the wildest yarns were never doubted. In their frantic
eagerness to share in the golden harvests being reaped at Buninyong,
Clunes, Bendigo, and Ballarat, the people wasted no thought on the
hardships of the journey; there was not a ship too crazy or a doghole too
dark to carry the desperate adventurers.

Jim Done's bunk was in a third story. The den it was built in was like a
steam-warm pest-house in the hot latitudes, and in the cold a clammy
tomb; but he had no thought of complaints. A new country and a new life
lay before him; he cared little for the troubles and privations by the
way. To-night his mind was given over to reflections arising out of the
incidents of the last few hours. They were not pleasant reflections. The
adventure loomed like a misfortune. He hated the idea of the notoriety it
would bring him; and, picturing himself the object of the sentimental
admiration of a score of simpering busybodies of both sexes, fumed
fiercely, and framed biting invectives. A voice close to his ear startled
him. Turning sharply, he saw the head of Phil Ryan on a level with his
own. Phil was standing on the lowermost bunk, offering the first tribute,
a pint pannikin of steaming hot grog.

''Tis the thing the docthor orthered,' said Ryan, with timorous humour,
fearing an ungenerous response.

It was Jim's first impulse to refuse the offer with out compliments, but
at that moment the greasy ship's lantern swinging above them on a rope's
end illumined the Irishman's face, and Done saw his mark upon it--a long
purple wheal under the left eye, a week old yesterday, but still
conspicuous. For a reason he could not have explained even to himself,
that changed the young man's mind. He drank the liquor, and returned the
pannikin with a 'Thank you!' not over-cordial.

'Yer a proper man, Done,' said Ryan, 'an' I'm proud I fought wid ye, an'
mighty glad ye bate me. Good-night!'

'Good-night,' answered Done coldly. He had been too long at variance with
men to take kindly to popularity now.

II

NEXT morning Done lingered below till the day was well advanced, but the
darkness and the heavy atmosphere 'tween decks drove him into the open.
It was a fair day, a big placid sun was shining, and the breeze followed
them with a crisp suggestion of glittering ice-fields far down in the
south. The sailors and passengers were grouped in small parties of six or
seven, lounging about the deck in lazy abandonment, leaning over the
side, smoking comfortably, and spitting with a certain dreamy
satisfaction into the sweet, clean sea, or sitting in rings on improvised
seats, alert, and loud in argument.

Jim's youthful face was even more than usually forbidding that morning as
he stepped amongst the men to his favourite position on one of the guns.
He feared an attempt to break through his reserve, some demonstration
arising out of last night's adventure, that might be taken advantage of
by the men to force their society and friendship upon him. He looked at
none of the faces turned curiously in his direction, and his expression
of stubborn enmity killed the cheer that sprang from a few of the
forecastle passengers, and it tailed into a feeble absurdity. Leaning
upon the old wooden gun-carriage, with his arms supporting his chin; he
stared at the cleavage of the green sea and the swelling foam, feeling at
his back all the time the cackle of criticism, like an irritation of the
spinal marrow, chafing fretfully at this further proof of the failure of
his long endeavour to school himself into complete indifference.

Absolute serenity in the teeth of public opinion--good, bad, or
indifferent--that was an ideal frame of mind, to the attainment of which
he had set himself when still a mere boy; but men and women remained
powerful to hurt and to auger him. He had acquired from his long moral
exercise a certain power of restraint up to the point at which his fierce
temper blazed; he reached the stage of ignition without those displays of
sparks and smoke that are usual preliminaries to a 'flare-up.' He had
learned, too, in the course of his schooling, to simulate an imposing
unconcern under commonplace trials and tribulations, when it so pleased
him, and between the satisfaction to be felt in being able successfully
to assume a given virtue and in having actual possession of that virtue
the distinction is too delicate for unregenerate minds.

The young man did not envelop himself in his spare skin of
imperturbability at this crisis, because he felt that some show of active
resentment was necessary to repel effusive admirers and maintain the
barrier he had set up between himself and his fellow-travellers. When Jim
Done set foot on board the Francis Cadman he was flying from an
intolerable life, seeking to escape from despair. This he did not admit
to himself, for he had the indomitable pride of a lonely man who gave to
thought the time that should have been gloriously wasted on boon
companions and young love.

Done was a sensitive man, who had been some thing of a pariah since his
knickerbocker period, and was first the butt and later the bane of the
narrow, convention-governed public of a small English village. A fierce
defiance of the people amongst whom he had lived his life kept him in his
native place till after his twenty-first birthday. He rebelled with all
his soul against the animal unreason of these men, women, and children,
puzzling over the fanatical stupidity of their prejudice, and, striving
to beat it down, intensified it and kept it active long years after all
might have been forgotten had he bowed meekly to 'the workings of
Providence,' as manifested in the thinkings and doings of the Godfearing
people of Chisley.

When James Done was five years old the only murder that had been
committed in Chisley district within the memory of the oldest inhabitant
was done by a member of little Jim's family. The murderer was tried,
found guilty, and sentenced accordingly.

The murder had a romantic plot and melodramatic tableaux, and was
incorporated in the history of Chisley--in fact, it was the history of
Chisley.

The murderer passed out, but his family remained, and upon them fell the
horror of his deed, the disgrace of his punishment. They became creatures
apart. With all Chisley understood of the terror in those dread words,
'Thou shalt not kill,' it invested the unhappy family, and they bowed as
if to the will of God.

Jim's mother, a thin, sensitive woman, with a patient face, put on a
black veil, and was never afterwards seen abroad without it. She helped
her boy a few weary miles along the road of life, and then one evening
went quietly to her room and died. Jim's sister, ten years older than
himself, took up the struggle where the mother dropped it, and sustained
it until the boy could go into the fields and earn a mean living for
himself, at which point she drowned herself, leaving a quaint note in
which she stated that life was too dreadful, but she hoped 'God and Jimmy
would forgive her--especially Jimmy.'

At this stage Chisley might have forgiven Jimmy, and condescended to
forget, and even indulge itself in some sentimental compassion for the
poor orphan, had the boy shown any disposition to accept these advances
kindly and with proper gratitude; but for years Jim had been reasoning
things out in a direct, childish way, and in his loneliness he was filled
with an inveterate hatred. He chose to live on as he had lived, accepting
no concessions, disguising nothing, and Chisley quite conscientiously
discovered in his sullen exclusiveness and his vicious dislike of worthy
men the workings of homicidal blood, and accepted him as an enemy of
society.

Early in his teens Jim recognised the value of brute strength and human
guile in his dealings with the youth of Chisley, and set himself to work
to cultivate his physical qualities. All that the pugilists and wrestlers
could teach him he picked up with extraordinary quickness, and to the
arts thus acquired he added cunning tricks of offence and defence of his
own contriving. He had a peculiar aptitude for wrestling and pugilism,
delighted secretly in his strength and swiftness, and would walk five
miles to plunge like a porpoise in the stormy sea.

He had submitted to much in his joyless youth, but now, conscious of his
strength and expertness in battle, he set himself deliberately to defy
his enemies and resent with force of arms every encroachment upon his
liberty, every insolence. There was a sudden epidemic of black eyes
amongst the youth of the village; cut faces, broken ribs, and noses of
abnormal size served the heirs of Chisley as stinging reminders of the
old shame and the new courage and power of Jim o' Mill End, that being
the name given to the boy in accordance with an awkward provincial custom
of identifying a man with his property, the situation of his residence,
or some peculiarity of manner.

On one occasion the lad fell upon a hobbledehoy who had just given a
highly diverting pantomime representing the hanging of a man, with
realistic details, and, having beaten him in fair fight, broke his
collar-bone with an atrocious fall. For this outrage Jim o' Mill End was
called upon to answer to the law, and, the answer he had to give being
considered wholly unsatisfactory, Jim was sent to gaol for a term of
days.

Chisley, if Slow to discover its mistakes, was not wholly imbecile; it
learned in time to respect the fists of Jim o' Mill End, and now hated
him quite heartily for the restraint imposed. But Jim derives little
satisfaction from his triumph; Chisley conquered him by stupid
submission. His physical superiority won him nothing but immunity from
open insult; the young men and their elders were careful to give him no
reasonable opportunity of asserting the rights of man in their teeth with
a dexterous left, and Jim was now beyond disputing with children. The
unhappy boy was not deceived by the new attitude his neighbours had
assumed towards him. He saw an increased dislike behind the stolid,
animal-like faces that met him everywhere, and felt that silence was
worse than insult, more galling than blows. He detected jeers under the
mask of dogged respect, and had passionate impulses to beat and tear,
finding himself still powerless against the brutal injustice that had
poisoned his life.

Baffled here, Jim o' Mill End turned greedily to the fount of wisdom
seeking justification for his deep contempt for his fellows,
corroboration of his opinions as to the stupidity, ignorance, and
vileness of mankind, He read greedily, finding justification everywhere.
Poets, philosophers, novelists, historians--they had all found man out,
just as he had done. Discovering an echo of his beliefs, he thrilled with
hot delight. He met allies amongst the poets, and adored them. It is
strange how sympathetic books drift to the hand of a reader possessed
with a consuming idea; how they gather around him, fall open to his eye,
and give up the thing he yearns to feed on. Without the knowledge
necessary to selection, Jim had an affinity for books of pessimistic
doctrine, and though both means and opportunities were limited, he
gathered together, in the course of two years, quite a library of
precious volumes, and he came forth from these an intellectual giant
refreshed. He saw Chisley on a plane far below him, a sink of ignorance,
and judged it like a god--or a boy. Whatever Chisley respected he found
excellent occasion to despise; whatever it revered he discovered to be
false and contemptible. His sense of superiority was magnificent; it gave
him a glorious exultation. A few hot words with the clerical caretaker of
the Chisley conscience over the question of Sabbath observance exposed
the young man--the gaol-bird--as an infidel and a scoffer. Jim was no
infidel, but communities like Chisley do not under stand subtle
distinctions in theology. Here was fresh occasion to fear and abhor Jim
o' Mill End; here was justification for many evil prophecies.

For a time Jim revelled in his great moral superiority and dreamed
dreams. But the gnawing impatience returned--the unrest, the craving for
something he could not define, but which always merged itself into his
great grievance. He lived alone. At his work--which he obtained readily,
for he was strong and efficient, and gave double value for his wages--he
had no mates. Girls he had seen grow up from babyhood developed into
beautiful creatures, with miraculous eyes, round limbs, and cheeks so
red, so tender, that their soft ripeness haunted his dreams. Under cover
and in secret he would watch them pass or at play with a throbbing heart
and a passionate hunger for companionship, and discover himself doing
this with something of a shock, ashamed of his interest in his enemies,
resentful of all emotions that ran counter to his cherished antipathies.

When the news of the discovery of fabulous gold deposits in far Australia
reached Chisley, Jim had thoughts of a new life in a new land: he craved
for a wide field and a wild life; nothing withheld him but pride, the
egotism that would not permit of his abandoning a struggle even with men
so contemptible as these ignorant villagers. But the hunger for humanity
filled him with visions of a new society in which he would be one with
his fellow-men, and then his enemies seemed so pitiful that he knew
himself for fool and blind to waste a care upon them. So he sold the
small property at Mill End, took up his few belongings, and left Chisley
quietly by night, eager to leave all the old life behind him, anxious for
the new.

Standing thus, looking out along the pathway of the Francis Cadman, Done
had reviewed his life almost daily, sometimes broadly and briefly, as
given here--sometimes going into excruciating details of suffering,
shame, terror, and hate; but his eyes were always turned forward.

Done meditated uninterruptedly for nearly an hour. Gradually the
conversation of the group behind him had drifted from his business and
the affair of the previous night to the great absorbing topic of the past
four months--Australia, the land of mad dreams, where the hills were
powdered with precious 'dust,' and the rivers purled over nuggets of pure
gold.

A hand fell upon the young man's shoulder; he turned sharply, angrily,
and beheld the bland face and trim figure of Captain Evan. With the
Captain was a handsome lady in black, who had already created in Jim's
mind a confused impression of massed raven hair and big, innocent dark
eyes that had a trick of floating up from under heavy lids and thick,
long lashes to their greatest magnitude, and then disappearing again like
revolving lights.

'All right after your plunge, my lad?' inquired the Captain heartily.

Done gave the expected reply, conscious of the eyes signalling
appreciation, and there was a pause.

'You do not inquire after the young lady, Done!'

'I've heard the men speaking of her, Captain. I understand she' pretty
well?'

'Still, a little gentlemanly attention, you know. She is most grateful.'

Done stiffened a trifle, and the line of brows asserted itself.

'I don't ape gentility,' he said quietly. 'I'm glad the young lady's well
again, but genteel formal ain't much in my line, I think.'

'Hem!' The Captain's eyes narrowed, his air of patronage lifted. He was
as gentlemanly an old sea-dog as ever bully-damned a ship from the gates
of hell on a blind night, and was proud of his first-cabin
accomplishments. 'This lady is Mrs. Donald Macdougal,' he said. 'Miss
Lucy Woodrow is Mrs. Macdougal's companion.'

Jim gathered his soft cap in a handful and bowed moderately; but the lady
held out dainty gloved fingers, and flashed her bright eyes upon him.

'We all think you quite a hero, Mr. Done,' she lisped--' quite!'

'Fact is,' said the Captain, 'the ladies and gentle men greatly admire
your noble conduct.'

'Most noble and brave,' added Mrs. Macdougal softly.

The young man had a presentiment of mischief, and fortified himself.

'And,' the Captain continued, 'they have held a little meeting to consider
the idea of--ah, expressing their appreciation in a--er----hem!--an
adequate and proper manner.'

The Captain was quoting the chief orator--himself. He paused with an
expectant air, but Done was apparently quite impassive; evidently the
fact that the ladies and gentlemen of the first class wished to put on
record their very proper respect for British pluck and the positive
virtues by giving the hero of the moment an inscribed watch or a gold
locket did not appeal to this young man.

The pause became uneasy. If Jim had betrayed some confusion--blushed
stammered, protested--all would have been well; but he waited calmly.
Captain Evan had only two manners--his polished, first-class maimer and
his ship manner, the manner with which he worked the Francis Cadman--and
it was a mere step from one to the other. For a moment he was perilously
near assuming his natural and most successful manner, blasting Done to
the depths for a high-stomached, adjectival swab, and commanding him out
of hand to accept the proposed honours and emoluments with proper respect
and gratitude, and be hanged to him.

'Of course,' said Mrs. Macdougal gracefully, 'only if you approve, Mr.
Done.' But the inference was that he could do nothing less with such eyes
openly beseeching him.

'I can't agree to this,' said Jim decisively, addressing himself to the
Captain.

'Oh, come, you must not be shy!' murmured the lady.

'I cannot agree to any demonstration or accept any gifts,' persisted Jim.
'You're very kind, I believe; but I'm reserved--I detest display.'

'Still, you know, my man, brave actions like yours cannot be totally
disregarded by feeling people.'

'To be sure!' from the lady.

'Captain Evan,' said the young man firmly, 'ever since I came on board
the Francis Cadman I've endeavoured to keep myself to myself. I asked
nothing from anybody on this ship, but simply to be left alone. That's
all I ask now. Perhaps I appear boorish to the lady, but the instincts of
a lifetime must be respected.' Jim spoke like an old man. The lady found
him very impressive.

'Very well, Done,' said the Captain, looking searchingly into Jim's
strong young face, 'we'll say no more about the matter.' He moved away,
but the lady extended the slim gloved fingers again, lowering her eyes
for an effective unveiling.

'I respect your feelings,' she said, as if making great concession.

Really, the boy was most interesting, so handsome, so unusual. She smiled
upon him like a guardian angel with exquisite teeth, and the scamp turned
again to the sea, apostrophizing in fo'c'sle idiom all interfering fools
and sentimental humbugs.

III

Lucy Woodrow did not appear on the deck until after nightfall. Jim
understood that she would insist upon expressing lifelong gratitude with
the usual effusion and the usual tears. He feared the ordeal, and
prepared himself for it. He had seen the girl often during the voyage,
sometimes accompanied by a blonde youth, whose beautiful clothes and
exquisite manners afforded unfailing material for primitive satire in the
forecastle, but, as a rule, quite alone, muffled in a dark, hooded cloak,
watching the sea, always with her face turned yearningly back, as if
England and home lay straight out along the vessel's wake. She was
middling tall, eighteen perhaps, with a thin but supple and pleasing
figure, and a quiet, smileless face, that wanted only happiness to make
it beautiful.

Done's misanthropy was not a quality of his nature, it was thrust upon
him, and did not prevent his being a close observer of men and things;
but that he had the smallest interest in any person on board was not
believed by one of his shipmates, since he was instinctively careful to
betray no concern. He had been struck by the girl's apparent loneliness.
The attentions of the blonde youth were borne meekly, as part of the
contiguous discomforts--that much was obvious to the forecastle and all
under. It never occurred to Jim that she was probably placed like
himself, and had good reason to stand aloof.

When he had been on board the Francis Cadman a month or so, Jim was
amazed to find that the attitude of the passengers and the crew towards
himself was almost analogous to that of the people of Chisley. Nearly
every phase of feeling that was manifested amongst the villagers
presented itself here, and he was troubled. His first suspicion was that
his identity had become known. He had small knowledge of men, and a sick
fear gripped him at the thought that all communities were alike, and
would reflect the suspicions and animosities of his little village if it
were known among them that one of his blood had done murder, and had
suffered as a murderer. But no whisper of his story reached his ears, and
he remained perplexed. He had yet to learn that society in all its phases
is ever intensely suspicious of the man apart. His one desire had been
that he might be lost amongst the passengers, that he might efface
himself in the crowd by keeping carefully out of every man's way and
concerning himself with the interests of none. By doing this he hoped to
land in Australia unknown, unheeded, and start his life again, cut off
from the past completely. He had only succeeded in making himself
notorious. He was silent, reserved, but he was different to the others,
and to hide amongst sheep one must be a sheep. Jim's very anxiety to
escape notice made him conspicuous. His aloofness was resented as 'dirty
pride,' and, being strange to all, he became the butt of many.

Jim Done was not of the type that rough-living men select as the victims
of their small jokes; but in the forecastle the disposition to play upon
the Hermit developed from small and secret things into open harassment,
and Jim's stoicism was wholly misconstrued. He did not seem to see things
that would have caused others in the company to fill the ship with bad
language and dread of death; he was impervious to rhymed jibes and broad
sarcasms that were supposed to have peculiar powers of irritation if
repeated constantly, day after day and night after night, without any
apparent feeling, or motive, or reason under the sun.

Fire was struck one evening with a particularly good joke played upon
Done in his bunk. Jim stepped down amongst the laughing men in his shirt,
and selecting the one whose laugh was loudest and most hearty, he struck
him an open-handed blow that drove him like a log along the floor. There
was little noise. A narrow 'ring' was improvised, two or three bits of
candle were found to help the sooty ship's lantern, and the men fought as
they stood.

Jim's opponent was Phil Ryan, a smart young sailor, six or seven years
his senior. The fight was short but lively, and the onlookers had not one
word of comment to offer after the first round. The men gazed at Done
with a ludicrous expression of stupid reproach. He had deceived, betrayed
them; he had posed as a quiet, harmless man, with the manners of an
aristocrat, when he might have been ship's champion at any moment by
merely putting up his hands.

Phil went down five times. The fifth time he remained seated, gazing
straight before him, with one sad, meditative eye, and another that
looked as if it could never be of any use as an eye again.

'Get up, Ryan!' urged Phil's second.

Phil did not move; he gave no indication of having heard.

'Ryan, get up, man!' The second prompted him with his toe.

'Meanin' me?' said the vanquished.

'To be sure. Be a man! Get up and face him.'

'Divil a fear o' me!' said Ryan. 'I'm never goin' to get up agin till you
put that wild man to bed.' He pointed at Jim.

'Are you licked, then, Ryan?'

'Licked it is. Any man is li'ble to wander into error, maybe, but there's
wan thing about Phil Ryan, he's open to conviction, an' he's had all the
conviction he wants this blessed night.'

'Then we've had enough?' said the second, with an uneasy eye on Jim.

'We have that,' continued Ryan, 'onless some other gintleman would like
to resoom th' argumint where I dthropped it.' The fallen hero ran his
good eye eagerly from face to face.

But Done had already returned to his bunk, and the others seemed
indisposed to put him to further trouble. No more jokes were played upon
the Hermit. The cynics and the wits developed a pronouncedly serious
vein, and it was resolved that for the future Jim Done should take his
own road, and behave in his own peculiar way, without provoking objection
from the company.

'Tis a curtyis an' gintlemanly risolution,' said Ryan, tenderly
caressing his inflated eye, 'an' a great pity it is we forgot to think iv
it sooner.'

The respect the forecastle had acquired for Done was vastly increased by
his rescue of Lucy Woodrow. Conduct that had previously been ascribed to
mere conceit was now accounted for by most romantic imaginings, for it is
a cardinal belief amongst men of their class that the true fighter is
superior to all little weaknesses and small motives. When the girl
crossed the moonlit deck to Done's side, the sailors drifted away out of
earshot, and inquisitive eyes could not turn in Jim's direction without
provoking a profane reproof.

Done's heart beat heavily as the slim, dark figure faced him, extending a
trembling hand.

'I am Lucy Woodrow,' she said in a voice little above a whisper.

'Yes,' he answered simply.

Her hand closed upon his fingers, and she was silent for a moment,
evidently deeply agitated. Her head was bent, hiding her face from his
eyes; and he noticed curiously the moonlight glimmering like tiny sparks
in her red-brown hair.

'You saved my life,' she continued; 'you risked your own. I thank you
with all my heart.'

There was something in her voice that made the simple, formal words quite
eloquent, but Jim scarcely heeded them; he was terrified lest she should
kiss his hand, and withdrew it abruptly.

'I can only say thank you--thank you! And one says that in gratitude for
a mere politeness. But you understand, don't you? My heart is full.'

'Yes, I understand,' he said. 'Now, please, try to say no more about it.
I'm glad to have helped you; but the risk I took was very small after
all. I've almost lived in the sea.'

She raised her face and looked into his eyes.

'It is very easy for you to speak like that,' she said; 'but I know that
if it were not for you at this moment my poor body--' She sobbed and
turned to the sea, with something of its terror and desolation in her
face, and Done understood the grim idea that possessed her.

'Thank God, it was not to be!' he said; and he felt more deeply at that
moment than he had done for many years.

Lucy Woodrow remained silent, leaning upon the gunwale with her face to
the sea, and he noticed presently that she was weeping, and was silent
too. When she spoke again the new feeling in her voice startled him.

'Why did you save me?' she asked in a passionate whisper.

'Why?' He was full of wonder, and repeated the interrogation vaguely.

'Yes, why--why? You had no right!'

'Is it a matter of right?' he asked, stunned. 'I saw you fall. I don't
know why I jumped over. My next conscious action was of striking out in
the water. The act was quite involuntary.'

'You had no right!' Her voice was very low, but instinct with a grief
that was tragic.

'Tell me what you mean.' Unconsciously, he spoke in the soothing tone one
adopts towards an injured child.

'I did not fall overboard.'

'Then, what happened?'

'I threw myself into the sea!'

'You--you wished to drown?'

'Yes, I wanted to die--to be rid of my wretched, empty life.'

Done was thrilled. He gazed earnestly upon the frail young figure; he had
a dawning sense of the possibilities of life and emotion in others. He,
too, had often thought of self-slaughter in an abstract way as the final
defiance; but here was a mere girl for whom life held so little that she
craved for and dared death. A remembrance of his own sister came back to
him, softening his heart to pity. He touched Lucy's arm gently.

'And when you were thanking me just now,' he said, 'you--'

'I lied? No, no, no!' she cried, with a revulsion of feeling; 'I meant
it! I am grateful--indeed I am grateful! I longed to die; but the thought
of washing about in these terrible waters makes me ill with fear. When
the waves took hold of me and swept me under I wished to live--I had a
wild yearning for life. Many times since last night I have felt the water
sucking me down and the mighty waves piling above me, and have felt again
the utter helplessness and terror.' Shuddering, she covered her face with
her hands, but continued speaking after a moment's pause. 'It was
horrible to die; but I am wretched--wretched! and I shall never be brave
enough to venture again--never!'

She threw the hood back from her abundant hair and stood a little apart,
her hands pressed upon her eyes, struggling with her tears, already
wondering at the sudden, overwhelming emotion that had swept her into
this betrayal. He mused in a troubled way, perplexed by her
contradictions avowal, feeling that, after all, he might have done this
girl a great wrong.

'Has your life been so unhappy, then?' he asked.

'It has been too happy,' she replied in a constrained voice.

'Too happy?'

'If I had learned to know sorrow sooner I could have borne it better,
perhaps; but until a year ago my life was all happiness. Before that I
had those who loved me, and neither fears nor cares. My father died, and
mother followed him within seven months. I was their only child; I found
myself alone, beset with anxieties and terrors, utterly desolate. I am
going to be Mrs. Macdougal's companion at her husband's sheep-run, deep
in the Australian Bush, and to teach their children. Since coming aboard
I have been too much alone; I have had too much time to think of my
hopelessness, my loneliness. There were moments when I seemed to be cut
off from the world. It was in one of these moments that I--I--' She made
a significant gesture. Her voice had grown faint, and her limbs trembled.

'Stay,' he said gently, 'I'll get you a seat.'

His concern about this stranger, his curiosity, occasioned no
self-questionings, no probing into motives. For the time being his
customary attitude of mind--that of the pessimist sceptically weighing
every emotion--deserted him. He had been, in his small circle in Chisley,
the one person with a tangible grievance against life, but here he found
another at more bitter variance with Fate, and weaker by far for the
fight. A mutual grievance is a strong bond. He was lifted out of himself.
When he returned he found Lucy Woodrow much more composed. She thanked
him, and seated herself in the shadow.

'Mr. Done,' she said, 'I owe you an apology. You did me a great service,
and I have made that an excuse for inflicting my troubles upon you.' Jim
noted the conventional phrases with a feeling of uneasiness. 'You are
very kind, but something I have confessed I want you to forget. I lost
control of myself.'

'You may trust me to say nothing.'

Yes, yes; I am sure of that,' she added hastily, 'but I want you to
forget. I should not like to see it in your face if we meet again.'

'Why fear that? For what you did you have to answer to yourself alone.'

'I did not confess the truth even to Mrs. Macdougal,' the girl went on in
a low voice. 'I have been a little hysterical, and it is very good of you
to bear with me.'

'I'm glad you told me; it gives me an interest, and I've never been
interested in the fate of another human creature since I was a mere boy.'

'I did wrong in the sight of God. You have saved me from a great crime.'

'No! If life had become unbearable you were justified. When you said I
had no right to interfere, you spoke the truth. No man has the right to
insist upon a fellow-creature continuing to live when life has become
intolerable.' Jim was most emphatic on this point.

'Hush! Oh, hush! I know I said it, and I have thought it too; but the
thought was born of weakness and cowardice.'

Done, who thought he understood himself clearly, and believed he had a
plan of life as precise and logical as the multiplication table, was
puzzled by a nature almost wholly emotional, and she continued:

'I mean to be brave, to meet the future with hope. It was my loneliness
that terrified me. I thought it might be always so, but perhaps real
happiness awaits me out there. I may make true friends.'

She spoke eagerly, anxiously, seeking corroboration, looking to him for
encouragement with touching wistfulness, as if he had been a graybeard
and an old and trusted friend, rather than a mere youth in years, and an
acquaintance of only a few hours.

He felt the appeal, and tried to respond.

'Yes yes,' he said. 'Then, at least, one can always fight the world. If
we can't be loved, we can make ourselves feared. There's a great deal in
that.'

The girl was surprised at his warmth, and a little startled by his
philosophy.

'I could not think that,' she said softly. 'It must be terrible to be
feared--to meet always with doubt and shrinking where you look for
confidence and affection.'

'But when the world refuses to accept us, when it uses all our fine
emotions as scourges to torture us, then we must fight.'

'I--I fight the world!' The girl rose in some agitation, and raised two
tremulous hands, as if in evidence of her weakness.

The gesture staggered him a little. He had been not so much defining her
position as defending his own, and although he could see the futility of
his principle of resentment as applied to her case, it was not in his
nature to preach the pleasing gospel of sentimental optimism. He had no
words of comfort to offer her; the gentle platitudes of encouragement and
consolation she needed, and which would have fallen so glibly from the
lips of an average man, were impossible to him. He was silent.

'One had better die,' continued Lucy Woodrow, 'than live at enmity with
one's fellow-creatures. Ah! the world is good and kind, under its seeming
cruelties. People are more generous than we know, but we should meet them
with open hearts, and give a warm welcome to their affection and
confidence. There must be something evil in the nature that is shut out
from human sympathy, human fellowship--something wanting in the heart
that is lonely, where there are scores of men and women eager to give
friendship and love. We repel those who are drawn to us by their goodness
of heart; we refuse what we most long for, and then blame others because
we are unhappy.'

The girl was speaking the thoughts in which she had vainly sought
comfort. She ceased abruptly, and, moving to the side, stood with her
eyes turned yearningly back over the sea, oppressed by her loneliness and
the home-sickness that had not left her since the shores of England faded
from her sight.

Jim felt a stir of something like resentment at his heart. He found in
the girl's words a reflection of the beliefs of his native village, and
perhaps justification of them, and saw her for the moment as the
embodiment of the respectability, the piety, and all the narrowness of
Chisley. The thought revived his habitual reserve. He meditated an
escape, already regretting that he had permitted himself to drift into
this extraordinary position.

IV

MRs. MACDOUGAL came to Done's rescue a moment later. She sauntered
languidly up to the young couple in her character of the interesting
invalid, careful to make a charming picture in the moonlight.

'It is a delightful night, Mr. Done, is it not?' she said.

Jim admitted as much, without any display of interest, and the lady
continued:

'You know our dear girl is not strong. You must not keep her in the night
air. Why, Lucy, how foolish you are! not a single wrap, and the wind so
chilly! You'll certainly have a sickness.'

'I shall not be ill, Mrs. Macdougal,' said Lucy. 'But you are very good.'

Mrs. Macdougal's plump figure was covered with furs, and a handsome shawl
trailed from her arm; but it was characteristic of Mrs. Macdougal to
profess the sweetest solicitude for other people, whilst appropriating
for her own use and pleasure all the comfortable, pleasant, and pretty
things. She was not more than thirty-three, and looked like a gipsy
spoiled by refinements. Her social schooling had been confined to a long
course of that delectable literature devoted to the amours of a strictly
honourable aristocracy with superior milkmaids, nursery governesses, and
other respectable young persons in lowly walks. Indeed, Mrs. Macdougal,
having had no early training worth speaking of, had successfully modelled
her manners upon those of a few favourite heroines. She fancied the
expression, 'It is, is it not?' lent an air of exquisite refinement to
ordinary conversation. She was naturally artificial. Artifice would have
been her certain resort in whatever path it had pleased Fate to plant her
small feet. Her temper was excellent so far as it went, and her manner
tender and clinging. She would have preferred to have been tragic with
such eyes and such hair, but with her plump figure it was not possible.
She loved attention, particularly the attentions of men, and employed
many artifices to secure them, usually with success. She had engaged
Captain Evan on the deck during every afternoon for a whole week, fanning
away a purely hypothetical headache. Altogether Mrs. Macdougal was a
delightful fool; almost everybody liked her.

'Really, for your own sake, my dear! It will not do for two of us to be
invalids.' Mrs. Macdougal pressed a firm white hand upon her ample bosom,
and coughed a melancholy little cough, hinting at a deep-seated
complaint, the seriousness of which she could not long hope to disguise
from her friends.

Lucy retired dutifully, and her mistress composed herself in an effective
attitude for a long chat with the young man.

'Darling girl!' she said, gazing affectionately after the retreating
figure. It suddenly occurred to her that she was very fond of Lucy
Woodrow, although up to the time of the accident she had not given her a
second thought.

The young man did not feel called upon to make a demonstration; he merely
inclined his head and watched Lucy along the deck as a manifestation of
some little interest in the subject.

'If anything had happened to her that awful time!' Mrs. Macdougal's eyes
waxed to their greatest dimensions to express terror, distress, all the
excitement of the accident, and were veiled under their white lids and
heavy lashes to convey some idea of the grief that would have lacerated
that gentle breast had Lucy Woodrow perished in the cruel sea. 'Ah, Mr.
Done, I, too, owe you a debt of gratitude!' she continued. 'The poor girl
is in my care. I should never have forgiven myself.'

'I can't accept your gratitude, ma'am,' said Jim brusquely.

'So gallant, so noble!' murmured the lady. She was not succeeding, and
she felt it. The boy was too ridiculous. She assumed a new pose, gazing
dreamily over the side into the scudding sea.

'If I were to fall in, Mr. Done,' she said, after a telling pause, 'you
would save me too?' She smiled coquettishly.

'I should not, Mrs. Macdougal; the responsibility is too great.'

She did not fully understand him, and was quite shocked, but answered
brightly:

'Oh yes, it is, is it not?'

Jim now resented the woman's intrusion upon him with a cublike
sullenness. He even longed to be avenged upon her for his uneasiness, and
would have liked to have said quite coolly, 'In the devil's name, madam,
leave me to myself!' It piqued him that, after all, he had not the moral
courage to do this, so he turned a forbidding shoulder, pretending
interest in the scud of sea.

'Really, Mr. Done, you are foolish to hide yourself here,' continued Mrs.
Macdougal. 'It is so much pleasanter in our part, and you have the
freedom of the ship, you know. Dear, kind Captain Evan could not deny me.
Do come! Our little entertainments will delight you, and everybody will
be so pleased.'

'I'm very well where I am, thanks.' The lad's tone was not at all
gracious.

'But you are so much above these men, and there are several nice cabin
passengers--quite superior people, who are anxious to know you.'

'You're mistaken, ma'am. I'm a farm labourer going out there to earn my
living. I'm at home here with common men, and I hate superior people!'

'They are trying, are they not?' This with a gush of confidence and a
little air of being weary of the great ones of the earth.

Mrs. Macdougal made several further efforts to induce Done to allow
himself to be lionized by the first-class passengers, who, to escape for
a time the boredom of a long, dull voyage, were eager to make a pet of
the interesting and mysterious hero; but Jim's moroseness deepened under
the attacks, and at length he escaped with only a glance of almost
maidenly coyness whenever circumstances threw him in the lady's way.

But Lucy Woodrow was not to be denied; she had been forced into the
current of his life, and he would make no effective fight against her.
After a few days her pale face, animated with an expression of pathetic
appeal, obtruded itself upon his meditations. He surprised himself
mapping out a pleasant and beautiful future for her, or dwelling upon her
misfortunes with a tender regret, and at such times took refuge from his
thoughts in sudden action, shaking this folly off with fierce impatience,
heaping abusive epithets upon his own head, arraigning himself as a
drivelling sentimentalist; and what shame could equal that of a puling
sentimentality?

After all, this girl stood for everything he had learned to despise and
hate. To her the conventions behind which society shields itself, its
shams and its bunkum, were sacred. He was convinced that had she known
the whole truth as Chisley knew it, she must have ranged herself with his
enemies. He admitted that he had been guilty of an impertinent
interference in her private affairs when he plucked her from the sea, but
did it follow that he need worry himself further about the young woman?
Certainly not! That point being settled, he could return to his dreams of
the Promised Land, the land of liberty, only to find the fair face
obscuring his fine visions, or to be interrupted by the girl herself, who
sometimes took refuge near him from the importunities of the male blonde,
but more often sought him out to satisfy the new interest his morbid and
peculiar character and, it must be admitted, his cold, good looks had
created in her breast.

At her approach Done felt the stir of a novel exultation in his
traitorous flesh. To be sure, he had woven romances for himself, but his
heroines were always of a type totally different to Lucy Woodrow. They
were strong, dark-eyed, imperious creatures, who espoused all his beliefs
and echoed his defiance of the world. What sense of humour had as yet
found place in his nature was exercised to the full at the expense of the
lackadaisical lover in life and in fiction, and now he felt there was
something absurdly pensive in this phenomenon of his own. He satisfied
himself that he was not in love with Lucy, but here were the marked
characteristics of the fond and fatuous hero--the obtruding face of the
beloved, idealized and transfused with a sickly pathos; the premonitory
tremblings; the recurrence of thoughts of the fair. It was all in
defiance of his philosophy--an insult to his manhood. Like many very
young men, Done was extremely jealous of the honour of his manhood. It is
the pride of a new possession.

Certainly Lucy Woodrow was quite honest to her nature in her attitude
towards the young stranger. She did not dissect her emotions: she did not
even question them. In becoming her hero Done had levelled all the
conventional barriers, and her friendship and concern were sincere. She
had never recurred to the incident of the rescue, feeling that the
subject was painful to him, and glad to dwell no further upon an act of
her own that of late had become quite inexplicable to her. Lucy no longer
turned her eyes to the wake of the Francis Cadman: she no longer yearned
backward to the land where she had left only a grave. Her mind was
employed with a most serious duty: she had adopted a mission, and that
mission was the regeneration of James Done. The regeneration was not to
be so much religious as moral. The poor boy's life was disordered; he had
suffered some great wrong; his naturally beautiful, brave, generous
disposition was soured; he had lost faith in God and in woman, and it
remained for her to restore his belief, to teach him that his
fellow-creatures were in the main animated with the most excellent
motives, and to drive away all those strange, wild opinions of his, and
generally brighten and sweeten his life and turn him out a new man. She
could not have explained how she was going to accomplish all this, but
every maiden is at heart a missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague
idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such
cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt
opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold,
sceptical light of his logic.

'Women don't bother themselves much to know if things are true,' he said.
'They're content with thinking they ought to be true.'

'Well,' she answered, 'why not try to be true to the things that ought to
be true?'

'If I wanted to, the world wouldn't let me.'

'You cannot believe that. The really good man is always obeyed and
reverenced.'

'And has always a fat billet. Yes; that kind of goodness is an excellent
thing as a speculation.'

She thought him wilfully paradoxical, and it came about, when their
acquaintanceship was about three weeks old, that while Jim Done, the
small and early philosopher, held Lucy in fine disdain as a born fool,
his vital humanity discovered strange allurements in her, and her
proximity fired a craving in his blood that sometimes tempted him to
crush her in his arms and bruise her lips with kisses. He grew less
brusque with her, and showed on occasions a sort of diffident gentleness,
and then Lucy was satisfied that her work was progressing.

'You never talk of your life there in England,' she said one night as
they stood by the mizzen-chains overlooking the sea. Since the use of the
forepart of the ship had been offered him as a privilege, Done
religiously abstained from encroaching a foot beyond the steerage limit,
although he had previously invaded the sacred reserve on occasion in
defiance of authority.

'No,' he said; 'I am running away from that.'

He gave little thought to the conversation, but he was thinking much of
the girl. She looked strangely beautiful and unreal in the dim
light--curiously visionary--and yet he felt that she radiated warmth and
life. Something stirred hotly within him: he was drawn to her as with
many hands.

'It would interest me,' she said--'it would interest me deeply.' She
turned her face up to him, and her eyes caught the light, and burned with
curious lustre in the shadowy face.

He did not misjudge her; he knew her concern for him to be the outcome of
gratitude and the kindliness of a simple nature, but it conveyed a sweet
flattery. Her hand rested upon his arm, and from its soft pressure flowed
currents of emotion. At his heart was a savage hunger. The faint scent
her hair exhaled seemed to cloud his brain and his vision.

'I feel that it is some sorrow, some wrong done you in your early life,
that makes you so bitter against the world,' she said. 'You think ill of
all because one or two have been unkind and unjust, perhaps. Because
someone has been false or unfair to you at home there, you are cold and
contemptuous and distrustful of the people around you here, who are eager
to be your friends.' Her tone was almost caressing.

For answer he caught her up in his arms, using his strength roughly,
cruelly, clasping her to his breast, and kissing her mouth twice, thrice,
with a fierce rapture. A moment he held her thus, gazing into her face,
and the girl's hands seemed to flutter up to his neck. Suddenly she
experienced an awakening. On the heels of the new joy came a new terror.
Setting her palms against his breast, she pushed herself from his relaxed
arms. A few feet of deck, a space of cold moonlight, divided them, and
they stood thus, facing each other in silence. Lucy had an intuitive
expectancy; the situation called for an avowal. It became awkward. A
boyish shamefacedness had followed Done's outburst of passion, and he
spoke never a word. The two were victims of a painful anti-climax. A girl
has but one resource in such an emergency. The tears came, and Lucy
Woodrow turned and stole away, leaving Jim stunned, abashed, with
unseeing eyes bent upon the sea. Done's right hand was striking at the
woodwork mechanically; his mind was in a turmoil. The blows increased in
force till blood ran from his knuckles, and then through his clenched
teeth came the bitter words. His rage against himself had a biting
vindictiveness. He cursed in whispers.

What a fool he had been! What a fatuous, blundering ass! What had he
done? Why had he done it? Was he in love, with Lucy Woodrow? This latter
question recurred again and again through the night, and the answer came
vehemently--no, no, and no again! He had nothing in common with the girl.
He recited a score of her simple, silly opinions in self-defence, and,
having strenuously reasserted his freedom, turned over to sleep, and
slept never a wink all night. What disturbed him most was the fear of
meeting Lucy Woodrow again. Perhaps she would avoid him now. There was no
comfort in the thought. He knew that what had happened must alter their
relations towards each other, but could neither admit that Lucy was
necessary to him nor summon up a comfortable indifference.

V

DONE caught a fleeting glimpse of Lucy Woodrow next day, Tuesday. She was
certainly avoiding him. The conviction made him bitter. How well
Schopenhauer knew these women! Lucy's squeamishness was further proof of
a narrow and commonplace mind. Had he suffered so much all his life at
the hands of people of this class, and learned to measure them so well
and hate them so sincerely, only to be won over by the prettiness of a
simple girl? He brooded over the matter for some hours, when it was
driven from his mind by an important happening. Early on the following
morning the first mate reported that land had been sighted. The news
stirred the ship as an intruding foot stirs an anthill. The people
swarmed upon the decks, and strained their eyes in the direction pointed
by Captain Evan's glass, which was in eager demand amongst the cabin
passengers all the forenoon.

One sailor, a canny Scot, produced a battered old telescope, and did a
very profitable business with the excited emigrants, whom he charged
'saxpence' for their first peep at the land where fortune and glory
waited them. The telescope was quite unequal to the occasion, but its
owner had carefully drawn a mark on the lens to represent the desired
object, and there were no complaints, although the Australian coast-line
sometimes sloped at acute angles, and often appeared to be quite
perpendicular.

Jim awoke to new sensations, and all his hopes and ambitions surged back
upon him with redoubled force. A childish rapture possessed him; he had
an impulse to run and jump, to act foolishly, and to yell like a boy at
play. It required some self-restraint to keep from throwing wide his arms
to the warm sun, that seemed to instil delight into his very veins.

Meanwhile Lucy Woodrow had experienced another shock, and had been
afforded some idea of the cheerful readiness with which a censorious
world misconstrues our amiable intentions, and imputes selfish motives to
the most disinterested missioner. She found herself quite unable to work
up a proper feeling of indignation against Done. Her training impelled
her to stigmatize his conduct as ungentlemanly, ungenerous, and
absolutely shocking. The words of condemnation came readily enough, but
there was no proper spirit of maidenly pride behind them. On the
contrary, deep down in her breast there glowed a sense of triumph, an
abiding joy, of which she made some effort to be ashamed. Her avoidance
of the young man on the day following his misdemeanour was a pathetic bit
of dissimulation, an effort on Lucy's part to deceive herself with a show
of coldness and dignity.

During the Tuesday afternoon and evening Mrs. Donald Macdougal had
assumed towards Lucy the touching airs of an injured innocent. Her cough
required more than usual attention, and her head was extremely bad, but
she bore it all with conspicuous resignation. She could not contain
herself long, however, and gave utterance to her grievance in the
evening.

'I do think you ought to give me a little more of your confidence, Lucy,'
she said, with an aggrieved air.

'In what way, Mrs. Macdougal?' asked Lucy, surprised at the words and the
tone.

'Well, my dear, I have treated you almost like a sister. I am in a manner
your guardian; and it's nice to feel one is trusted, is it not?'

'But I do trust you; and I am grateful too--most grateful.'

'It isn't that. You don't tell me things. For instance, about young
Done.'

'Really, Mrs. Macdougal, there is nothing of interest that you do not
know.

'Oh, nonsense, Lucy! Why are you blushing, then? You have been a great
deal together since the accident, and I permitted it because he is so
brave and handsome, and he is quite a gentleman, in spite of his
position. But '--and here the voice grew petulant--'I thought you would
give me your confidence. You ought to have had more consideration for me,
seeing how dull I was, and how stupid it is here, with nothing to do and
nothing to talk about.'

'My meetings with Mr. Done have been merely friendly. It would not amuse
you in the least to hear our conversation repeated.' Lucy felt that her
face was scarlet. She was angry and combative.

'Come, now, is that fair?' continued Mrs. Macdougal, patiently sad.

'You know you are the heroine of the ship's romance. We're just aching
with curiosity about it.'

'Mrs. Macdougal, you amaze me!'

'We have scarcely talked of anything else for weeks, and I did think
you'd put your trust in me.'

The girl was standing with squared shoulders and erect head, a patch of
colour on either cheek, a courageous spark in either eye, and wrath in
every gesture and in every line of her slim figure.

'Is this true?' she said. 'Do you mean to tell me that my friendship with
Mr. Done has been the subject of the usual idle chatter here, day and
night?'

'What could you expect, my dear?'

'That I have been criticised and scandalized and spied upon?'

'But with the nicest feelings and the best wishes. What else was there to
interest anyone? I thought you understood. It was so romantic and
delightful, and we were all so pleased to find him taking a real interest
in you. The people quite expect you to become engaged, you know. It would
be a most delightful ending, would it not?'

'It is a shame--a great shame!' cried Lucy. These people have no decency.
I will tell you this, Mrs. Macdougal that no word of what you speak of
has passed between Mr. Done and me.'

Mrs. Macdougal was quite grieved. 'The passengers will be disappointed
she said. 'I'm afraid they won't think it quite nice of you. You see,
these things are expected to end prettily. It's customary.'

It's very absurd and very mean.'

Mrs. Macdougal shook her head ominously. The thought of the chagrin of
the cabins, deprived of a satisfactory climax to their little romance,
filled her with gravest apprehension. Her strong belief was that Done and
Lucy owed it as a sacred duty to the eternal verities, as set forth in
popular fiction, to marry. If they failed to conform, they gave people
good grounds for a grievance.

Lucy Woodrow's spirit was up in arms. The girl who had feared nothing so
much as to find herself at variance with her fellows, and had believed
the affection and the goodwill of those about her to be the first
essentials to happiness, felt no weakness, no lack of self-reliance, now
that she was in some measure pitted against the many. She resented the
conduct of the passengers in making her the subject of their
tittle-tattle with a bitterness she had never felt before. In overlooking
her actions and assuming a right to influence her in a purely personal
matter, these people were guilty of an insolence to which she would not
submit. She thought she discovered a certain antagonism amongst those
with whom she presently came into contact, and the opposition developed
character. Pride came to her aid. No doubt some peeping Tom or prying
woman had been witness to the theft of kisses. In that case the incident
would now be a theme of conversation in the cabins. She could not trust
Mrs. Macdougal to withhold from the gossips a single word of their
conversation. Lucy's determination was to show herself superior to the
ship's opinion; she would not have it thought she was influenced one way
or the other, and for that reason it was necessary that there should be
no appearance of a quarrel between herself and Done.

She found him sitting on a gun-carriage, and seated herself by his side,
having offered her hand in token of amity.

Jim's heart had never been so light; his cherished animosities were fled
for the time being. But conversation was difficult. He detected a
difference in the girl that was not explicable to him, and imagined that
she was still angry. He realized, too, that she was at a disadvantage,
because of the service he had rendered her, and presently blurted
something like an apology.

'I suppose I oughtn't to have done that the other night?' he said.

'No,' she murmured. Her head was bowed, and her foot tapped tremulously
on the deck.

'It's the sort of thing the respectables pretend to be shocked at, isn't
it? Well, I regretted it immediately.' His voice had grown softer. 'I
did, upon my word!'

'Please don't speak of it,' she pleaded. In truth, the apology troubled
her deeply where the offence had left no pain. She wished it had never
been spoken The thought of it had power to provoke tears long after.

The Francis Cadman sailed majestically through the Heads into Port
Phillip on a beautiful Sunday morning in November, when the beneficent
spring was merging into a fiery Southern summer. The sun blazed with
tropic splendour in a sky of unspotted sapphire; the blue, translucent
waters danced in unison with the hearts on deck, rippling into gold and
silver and the sparkle of a myriad diamonds. Eager eyes saw the symbols
of wealth in all things, and a fever of exultation and expectancy burned
in the ship. Done was like a man drunken. It was as if sunshine were a
strange, new thing to him, as if he had never breathed deeply and truly
the good air of God till now. He had big affectionate impulses; he felt
that the sailors were fine fellows, his shipmates cheerful souls. He
would have liked to shake hands all round and assure them of his
friendship, but sailors and passengers were full of their own affairs,
and took no notice of him. For two days past there had been much
whispering amongst the crew and the men under contract to work the ship
that had been left crewless in Australian waters. Done detected an
undercurrent of excitement, and noticed many guarded consultations. That
there was some conspiracy afloat he was convinced, but the plotting was
conducted in so cheerful--even hilarious--a spirit that he suspected no
evil.

The ship was anchored off Queenscliff to bide the coming of the noisy,
grimy, paddle-tug engaged to tow her wearily into Hobson's Bay, and up to
her berth by the primitive river wharf. And now speculation and curiosity
were awakened in the cabins by the peculiar conduct of Captain Evan in
stationing armed sailors along the ship, larboard and starboard.

Shortly after, Done, who was watching developments with keen interest,
saw a Scandinavian seaman named Jorgensen steal over the side, and slip
into the sea like a porpoise. Jorgensen struck out for the shore,
swimming under water for the most part, till he had covered a distance of
about two hundred yards from the ship. Others, including the armed
sailors, had witnessed Jorgensen's escape, but no one spoke.

Nearly an hour passed, and then Jim saw that two boats were coming
towards them from a distant point. At the sight of these there was a rush
of sailors. No orders had been given, but a score of men busied
themselves lowering the Francis Cadman's boats, laughing at their work
and joking uproariously. Others came singing and yelling from the
forecastle and up through the hatchways, with bundles which they piled on
the deck. All order was abolished; the jubilant cries of the sailors were
echoed back from the shores over the placid sea.

Captain Evan stood upon the deck, pale with passion, gesticulating
furiously, shouting orders that no one heard. Every time he opened his
lips the sailors responded with louder yells of cheerful derision. Evan
rushed at one of the armed sailors, cursing heroically.

'Fire on them! Fire, I tell you!' he cried.

The man paid not the slightest heed, and Captain Evan, snatching the gun
from his hands, levelled it at the boatswain.

'Down on your knees, you mutinous dog!' he thundered.

The boatswain grinned amiably, and thrust his finger into the barrel of
the piece.

'By the holy, we've spiked your gun, Captain!' he said.

Evan pulled the trigger. The cap snapped and nothing more, and now,
worked into an ungovernable passion, he clubbed his gun, and bringing the
stock down upon the boatswain's head, stretched him upon the deck with a
cracked skull. Swinging his weapon, the Captain dashed at the men, but a
dozen pair of hands were on him, and he was dragged down. Bently, the
first mate, who went to his assistance, was served similarly. In a few
moments they lay helpless, trussed like turkeys ready for the roasting.
The cabin passengers gathered about, white-faced, full of terror,
thinking of piracy and all its attendant horrors. Some of the women were
screaming. The sailors lifted Evan and Bently; and Done, who was watching
the turn of events, greatly agitated, was startled into a new train of
thought by a woman who had thrown herself at his feet, clinging to his
knees, crying:

'Help him! help him! They are going to do murder!'

It was Mrs. Macdougal. Done started forward, and half a dozen sailors
moved to intercept him.

'You don't mean mischief?' he said.

'Devil a bit!' replied a big Irishman. 'We'll stow them out of harm's way
till we're safe on shore, an' never a mischief will be done to annywon at
all. Come along, Captain darlin',' he added. 'Ye'll rist aisier in yer
cabin. We're goin' diggin' fer the gould, an' not all the fiends out iv
Connaught could shtop us.'

Captain and mate were bestowed under lock and key, and, like a band of
schoolboys at breaking-up, the men continued their mutinous work. One
section had started a quaint chanty; the rest caught it up presently, and
with the rhythm of the song came something like order among the
mutineers. Singing lustily, they piled their baggage into the boats, and
Done, who had recovered the feeling of annoyance his impulsive
interference had occasioned him, watched them, rejoicing in sympathy. He
had brought no particular respect for law and order from the Old Land,
and this happy revolt delighted him. He would have loved to join the
merry adventurers in their defiance of authority. It was grand! Lustily
he sang the chanty, and as the boats, loaded down with sailors and their
traps, and towing astern in the warm sea strings of deserters for whom
there was no room aboard, moved off, he leaned over the bulwarks waving
his hat, and shouted with all the power of his lungs:

'Good luck to you, boys!'

They answered with a cheer, forgetting all differences in their present
robust animal spirits. Ryan sprang up in one of the boats.

'Come wid us, man; why don't you?' he cried.

Jim had a strong impulse to follow, but a small hand seized his.

'No, no--please, no!' whispered Lucy at his side.

He shook his head at the men. After all, there was no occasion for him to
run away; he was bound to no man.

The sailors had taken the key of the Captain's cabin with them, and by
the time Evan and the mate were liberated the crew of the Francis Cadman
and all the sailors under contract to the distracted owners of vessels
riding idle and helpless on Corio Bay and Hobson's Bay had disappeared
amongst the ti-tree fringing the shore, leaving the ship's boats afloat.
Five sailors remained aboard--one, the boatswain, was temporarily
disabled; two of the others were sick and bedridden. Captain Evan stood
on the main hatchway and reviewed the situation, and in his manner of
expressing himself there remained no trace whatever of the suave autocrat
of the cabins. In less than an hour his voyage had been converted into an
utter and ignominious failure.

The journey from the Heads to the river mouth in the wake of the tug-boat
Platypus, slow and toil some, set Jim in an itch of impatience. He was
longing to feel land under his feet once more, and was leaning over the
side, his awkwardly-packed canvas bag of belongings at his feet, watching
the line of Liardit Beach, with its few dingy buildings standing back
from the sea, apprehensive lest this, after all, should prove to be
Melbourne, his brave city of refuge, when Lucy Woodrow approached him to
say farewell.

'They tell me we are very near our journey's end,' she said. 'I wish to
ask you a favour before you go.'

She looked strong and confident, and he was grateful there were to be no
tears, having anticipated something like a scene. She had prepared to
land, too, and wore a dark dress he had not seen before, and a quaint
little hat that became her well. He thought her beautiful. The idea of
parting with her hurt now, and his pulse stirred impatiently. The
admiration in his eyes caused a flush to relieve the pale olive of her
cheeks.

'I'll do anything you ask,' he said,

'It is a very little thing. This is Mrs. Macdougal's address. I want you
to promise to write to me.'

'I will.'

'Your life in this new land will be active and adventurous, I'm sure, but
some day, in one month, or two, or perhaps a year, you will find time to
send me a letter to say how you are, and how the strange country pleases
you?'

'You are the only human creature I have met in friendship,' he said,
betrayed into warmth by her unaffected concern. 'I can never forget you,
Lucy.' He used her Christian name for the first time.

'Thank you, James,' she answered simply.

'No, no--Jim! Jim!' He had been called James only by the parson and the
magistrates of Chisley, and he despised the unctuousness that seemed to
cling to the name.

'Thank you, Jim,' she said, smiling. 'You see,' she continued gravely,
'what you have done for me makes it impossible that I can ever be
careless about your welfare. I shall always want to know where you are,
and if you are well and happy.'

'I'm not used to this sort of thing,' he stammered.

I bear it badly.' And, indeed, he had a most amazing disposition to lapse
into tears The disposition was never near to mastering him, but there it
was.

She saw his agitation, and it warmed the mothering feeling which, though
still a child in heart and years his junior, she had long felt for the
big, strong, friendless youngster.

'You will take this, won't you? I intend it as a little keepsake.'

She proffered a small gold locket somewhat shyly, and blushed deeply when
he opened it and discovered a tiny miniature of herself. He was pleased
to have it, and told her so in a graceless way.

'Do you mean to go ashore at once?' she asked presently.

'Yes; just as soon as I can.'

'Mrs. Macdougal is ready, and I suppose we leave the ship immediately.'

He took her small hand in his. 'Good-bye,' he said. He longed to hold her
in his arms again.

'Good-bye,' she whispered.

'I hope you'll find things easy for you out there, and that you will be
happy.'

'I think I shall. I am going to try hard for happiness--to be as happy as
I once was. Say you will try too.'

He looked at the wide sweep of blue sky, and the new land swathed in a
golden atmosphere of glorious sunshine and more glorious hopes, and did
not smile at her idea of happiness recoverable by distraint.

Mrs. Macdougal bustled up. She had brought dresses from Europe with the
object of prostrating what little feminine society there was in the
neighbourhood of Boobyalla, and wore one of them now. If her colour was
not all natural, it was a very excellent imitation. She looked charming.

'Sure you are quite ready, my dear?' she said. 'Macdougal will be
waiting. Macdougal of Boobyalla, you know.' This to Jim: 'And he's a most
impatient wretch. Saying au revoir?' she queried archly, after a pause.

'I was bidding Mr. Done good-bye,' said Lucy.

'It is very sad, parting with old friends,' murmured Mrs. Macdougal, with
veiled eyes.

'Sadder parting with new ones,' replied Jim, glancing towards Lucy.

'Oh yes, it is, is it not? But you will come and visit us some time at
Boobyalla. We are shipmates, and that's a sort of relationship in
Australia.'

Done thanked her, but equivocated. He could not see himself as the guest
of the great Donald Macdougal, J.P., of Boobyalla. The lady experienced a
glow of impatience. Only a hobbledehoy could prefer Lucy Woodrow's
immature charms to the ripe perfections of a woman of her years.

VI

JIM was the first off the Francis Cadman on the Monday afternoon when she
drew alongside the rough Yarra wharf just under Bateman's Hill, and when
he set his foot on Australian soil he planted one tendril of his heart
there. He let fall his bag, and looked about him. The arrival of the ship
had occasioned no interest that he could discover. Perhaps the news was
not yet common property. A dusty road along the banks of the river on his
right led to the town; there were a few scattered houses of dark stone
and primitive design on the hill before him, beside which the lawless
gum-trees flourished. The day was intensely hot; a wind that might have
breathed o'er the infernal regions whipped up clouds of dust, and spun
them into fantastic shapes, filling eyes and lungs, but no discomfort
could dull the joy he felt on coming into his kingdom. He had turned his
back to the wind to wait the passing of a sirocco of sand, when a
double-seated American waggon, drawn by two steaming horses, flashed on
him out of the storm, driving him headlong to the ground, and coming to a
standstill within a few feet. The bag had served as a buffer, and the
deeply-ploughed roadway made a soft bed, so that no bones were broken;
but Done arose with all his fighting instincts aflame, and turned upon
the driver.

'You murderous ruffian!' he cried. 'I've a mind to break--'

He stopped short, one foot upon the step, one hand grasping the ironwork
of the seat, staring at the driver, suddenly disarmed. The man on the
seat was a grizzled, malformed creature of about fifty, with a
deeply-wrinkled small face, burnt a dark tan, and almost covered with a
tangle of short, crisp, iron-gray whiskers. The suggestion of a
rough-haired terrier was so strong that Done expected the brute to bark
at him. The small eyes in the protecting shade of tufted brows, like
miniature overhanging horns, were keen and shrewd This extraordinary head
was supported by a small and shapeless body, the legs of which were much
too long and extremely thin, as were the arms also; but the wrists and
hands, strained to hold the restive horses, were hard, corded, and hairy,
suggesting a gorilla-like vitality in the curious man. Done let himself
down to the roadway again. One could not fight with so miserable a
cripple.

'You drive like a madman, mister,' he said in a milder tone.

'Maybe yer off the ship just now?' said the ape like driver, quite
ignoring Done's grievance and his words. 'So bein', you can tell we if
there's a Mistress Macdougal aboard her.'

The man kept his eyes on his horses; his heels were firmly set on the
footboard. It. needed all the strength of his iron wrists to restrain the
beasts--tall, lean bays, with a certain piratical rakishness about them,
long-maned and long-tailed, effective weapons against the voracious flies
that swarmed over their rumps. Their powerful frames showed through
clean, healthy hides, and their blood in the proud carriage of their
heads and their hot impatience under restraint. A half-caste aboriginal
boy, dressed apparently in his master's old clothes--and the master's own
clothes were none too new--sprawled on the bottom of the vehicle, and
grinned at Done in a friendly way over the tailboard. Jim resented the
cripple's contempt for his wrongs, and ignored the question put to him.
He was taking up his belongings again, when Mrs. Macdougal herself
fluttered by.

'Why, Mack!' she cried.

The driver's eyes left his horses' ears for a moment, and rested on the
lady. They displayed no particular feeling.

'Hello, missus!' he said casually, adding, after a pause: 'Best jump up.
Nags a bit fresh.'

Jim walked on. So this was Donald Macdougal, J.P., of Boobyalla. The
young man's annoyance fell from him. He thought of the devoted husband's
greeting after their long parting, and laughed aloud. Macdougal of
Boobyalla was no demonstrative lover. A few minutes later the waggon
dashed past Done; the bays were being driven at a gallop, and the vehicle
fairly jumped on the broken road. The young man caught a glimpse of Lucy
clinging desperately to her seat, and then waggon and horses were buried
in a dust-cloud of their own making, which was whirled away at a terrific
pace, and spun out of his view round a distant corner.

Done plodded along with his bag upon his shoulder. He had no definite
plan of action. He thought now of looking about him for a day or two
before leaving for the fields. No doubt it would be an easy matter to get
accommodation at some hotel or lodging-house. After that he would move
with the throng, and his future actions would depend upon such knowledge
as he might be able to gather from the experienced people with whom he
came in contact. He presently had ample proof that the driving of
Macdougal of Boobyalla was nothing extraordinary here. Three horsemen
passed him at a racing speed, and with much shouting and cracking of
whips, and a wild, bewhiskered Bushman, driving two horses in a light,
giglike vehicle, charged through the dust at a pace implying some
business of life or death; but a little further on Jim came upon the
steaming pair tethered to a post outside a rough structure labelled the
'Miner's Rest,' and at the bar stood the driver toying lazily with a
nobbler of brandy. He passed groups of men lounging against the building
and sitting in the street, all smoking, none showing particular concern
about anything. Their lethargy surprised him. He had expected to find the
town mad with excitement, to behold here the gold fever blazing without
restraint; but wherever there was a post to lean against a man was
leaning against it, exactly as if there were nothing doing, and the world
had not just run demented over the richness of their Victorian fields. It
remained for him to learn that this very excitement provoked a
corresponding lassitude, and that when the Australian diggers were not
indulging in the extreme of frenzied exertion or boisterous recreation
their inertia surpassed that of their own koala, the native sloth.

Ere he reached the busier part of the town, Jim made the disconcerting
discovery that he was a marked man, an object of public contumely. He had
heard calls of derision at various points along the road, and was
convinced now that for some reason or another he was exciting the
laughter and badinage of the men. This was a painful shock to Done's
happiness. The situation recalled Chisley, and something of the old
Ishmael stirred within him. He set his teeth and hurried on.
'Pea-souper!' was the epithet most in favour amongst his tormentors. Why
'Pea-souper!' Jim could not understand. He could see no aptness in its
application to him, and yet it was certainly a term of mockery.
'Pea-souper!' The taunt had an ignominious flavour. It hurt because it
recalled so much of what he had travelled halfway round the world to
escape.

He plunged into Elizabeth Street as if seeking cover. Here the crowd was
thick, and one man might pass unheeded. Elizabeth Street was the busiest
thoroughfare of Melbourne--a miserable, unformed street, the buildings of
which were perched on either side of a gully. Pedestrians who were not
sober ran serious risks of falling from the footpaths into the roadway
below, a rather serious fall in places. Plunged is the right word; the
road was churned into a dust-pit, on the footpath the dust lay
ankle-deep, and people on foot had the appearance of wading through
shallow water. Occasional gusts of the hot north wind seemed to lift the
Street like a blanket, and shake its yellow, insinuating dust in the
faces of the people.

Here Done found the characteristic lassitude of the unemployed digger and
the surging life of a town suddenly thronged with the adventurous men of
the earth blended in a strange medley. Men were lounging everywhere,
talking and smoking, or merely sunk in a state of abstraction. The talk
was all of digging. The miners were exchanging news, rumour and opinions,
and lying about their past takings, or the fabulous patches they had just
missed--lying patiently and pertinaciously. Many faces were marked and
discoloured from recent debauches. Lowly inebriates slept peacefully in
the dust, one with his head affectionately pillowed on a dog that snarled
and snapped at anyone coming within three feet of its master.

There was little variety in the dress worn. Even the man who had not been
two miles from Melbourne affected the manner of the digger, and donned
his uniform. Cabbage-tree hats or billycocks were on every head, and for
the rest a gray or blue jumper tucked into Clay-stained trousers and
Wellington boots satisfied the majority. A few swells and 'flash' diggers
exhibited a lively fancy in puggaries and silk sashes and velvet
corduroys and natty patent-leather leggings, but anything more
pretentious was received with unmistakable manifestations of popular
disfavour. A large bullock-team hauling a waggon load of bales blundered
slowly along the road, the weary cattle swinging from side to side under
the lash of the bullocky, who yelled hoarse profanity with the volubility
of an auctioneer and the vocabulary of a Yankee skipper unchecked by
authority. A little further on another team, drawn up before a hotel, lay
sprawling, half buried, the patient bullocks twisted into painful angles
by reason of their yokes, quietly chewing the cud. Riders and drivers
conformed to no rule of the road, and maintained a headlong pace implying
a great contempt for horseflesh, and no more respect for their own limbs
than for the neck of the merest stranger. From the bars, which were
frequent, came a babel of laughter and shouting. To the 'Pea-souper'
every thing was new and wonderful.

A squalid aboriginal swathed in an old tablecloth fresh from some
breakfast started from a corner, pointing a long, dirty finger at Done,
and grinning a wide grin.

'Yah! dam new chum!' he said. Then he laughed as only an Australian black
can, with a glitter of seemingly endless white teeth, and a strident roar
that might have been heard a mile off.

'New chum!' This appellation had been thrown at Done a dozen times.

'Pea-souper!' trumpeted a horseman through his hands. There were
sarcastic references to 'limejuice,' and Jim was asked by several
strangers, with a show of much concern, if his mother knew he was out.
'Does your mother know you're out?' was then a new and popular street
gag, and the query implied a childlike incapability of taking care of
himself on the part of the person addressed, and was generally accepted
as a choice piece of humour. Jim heard so many references to the 'new
chum's bundle' that he was presently satisfied he owed all these
unpleasant little attentions to the burden he carried, and he determined
to rid himself of it at the first opportunity. Turning into Bourke
Street, he eventually found a hotel where there was comparative peace.
Entering, he called for a drink.

'New chum?' queried the barman, after serving him.

'I suppose I am,' replied Jim. 'Look here, would you mind telling me what
in the devil's name a new chum is?'

'A new chum is a man fresh from home.'

'From England?'

'Scotland, Ireland, anywhere else, if he's green and inexperienced.
Miners from the Californian fields don't rank as new chums.'

'And how am I known as a new chum?'

The barman grinned. 'That'll tell on you all over the place,' he said,
indicating the bag. 'That's a true new chum's bundle. No Australian would
expatriate himself by carrying his goods in that fashion. He makes them
up in a roll, straps them, and carries them in a sling on his back. His
bundle is then a swag. The swag is the Australian's national badge.'

'Well, I'm hanged if that isn't a little thing to make a row about. Do
you reckon it shameful to be a new chum, then?'

'Not exactly. No offence is intended; the men jeer out of mere harmless
devilment. The new churn's got so much to learn here, he can't help
looking a born fool as a general thing.'

'And pea-souper and lime-juicer?'

'They've been hazing you properly, mate. Pea-soupers and lime-juicers are
strangers off shipboard. They'd never have spotted you, though, without
the bundle. There's no raw-meat tint about you; you're tanned like a
native. Buy a blue jumper and get a cabbage-tree up in place of that cap,
and you'd pass muster as a Sydney-sider born and bred.'

'A cabbage-tree?'

'Hat--straw. Get a second-hand one if you can: they're more appreciated.
Usually a man likes to colour his own hat as he colours his own pipe; but
you're eager to meet the Australian prejudice against newness. Another
bit of advice,' continued the bar-man, who was glad of the chance to turn
his vast antipodean experience to some account. 'If you happen to be
anybody in particular, as you love your peace of mind and your bodily
comfort, don't speak of it.'

'Luckily, I'm nobody in particular.'

'That's all right. I was idiot enough to let it be known that I was
afflicted with an aristocratic name, and I had to hold this job against
banter enough to drive a cow daft. Now my name's Smith.'

'Are you a new chum, then?'

'Lord no! I've been out seven weeks.'

It was Jim's turn to laugh. 'Well,' he said, 'if a man can qualify as a
representative Australian in seven weeks, I'm not going to complain.'

The barman provided much more valuable information. Bed and board could
not be had at that establishment for love or money, and, furthermore, it
was unlikely Jim would be able to find lodgings anywhere in Melbourne.

'I suppose you can take care of yourself--you look a likely man,' he
said. 'Well, the nights are so warm no man needs a dwelling. When you're
tired of knocking round to-night, take your traps down by the river, roll
yourself in your blanket in the lee of a gum-tree, and sleep there. Did
it myself for a week, and only had to put up one fight all the time.
Sleeping out's no hardship here. Meanwhile, in exchange for the latest
news from down under, I'll dump your swag, and keep an eye on her till
you call again.'

The young fellow's ready friendship was most grateful to Done, and he
remained in the bar till a run of business rendered further conversation
impossible, picking up useful knowledge by the way, and presently
discovering the barman to be a gentleman with an expensive polish, whose
most earnest desire was to hide his gentility and disguise the contingent
gloss under a brave assumption of the manners and speech peculiar to the
people of the rough young democracy.

Tea that evening was the most expensive meal Jim Done had ever eaten, and
far from being the best; but his appetite was equal to anything, and the
fare on the Francis Cadman had not been so dainty as to give him any
epicurean prejudices. It was night when Jim came from the primitive
restaurant, darkness having come down with a suddenness surprising to a
new chum accustomed to long twilights. Jim had taken tea in a tent near
Paddy's Market. Here scores of tents of all sorts and sizes were huddled
together. All cooking was done out of doors. Fires were everywhere, their
glow, reflected brightly on the canvas of the 'flies,' giving a fantastic
brilliance to the scene. Life stirred around him, jubilant, bounteous,
pulsing life. The levity of the people was without limit. Their
childishness astonished Done, but he lived to find this a characteristic
of the diggers in all parts; even the roughest men in the roughest camps
exhibited a schoolboy's love of horseplay and a great capacity for
primitive happiness. It was as if the people, having thrown off the more
galling restraints of civilization and order, felt their limbs and
spirits free for the first time, and exercised both with the freedom and,
the austere critic may say, the foolishness of mountain goats.

Jim's whole being was infected with the spirit of the place, his blood
danced. He had discarded his cap for a well-seasoned cabbage-tree, and
wore a blue jumper under his coat, and now passed unheeded, excepting
when a jovial digger, flown with brandy and success, roared a 'Good luck,
mate!' or commanded him in to drink. Social restraints were gone;
equality ruled the road; all men were brothers, and friendships of ten
minutes' standing were as sacred as the ties of kinship.

The night was young, but already turbulent. The hot wind had passed, and
the air was sweet and free from dust. As he moved along the street,
Done's ear caught the squeak and the twang of fiddle and banjo coming
through the confusion of voices. Step-dancing and singing were the most
popular delights. The ability to sing a comic song badly was passport
enough in digger society. The streets were lit with kerosene. Here and
there a slush lamp or a torch blazed before an establishment seeking
notoriety, shedding a note of lurid colour upon the faces of the bearded
men thronging the footpath. If there were laws controlling all these
elements, Jim failed to discover a sign of them; neither did he see sign
of the flagrant lawlessness he had been led to expect. The absence of
arms surprised him most of all. He looked to find knives and revolvers in
every belt, but saw no display of weapons, and noting the bluff,
lumbering kindliness animating the crowd, he thought of his own small but
carefully selected arsenal with some contempt.

Jim Done walked about the streets for two hours, interested in
everything, disappointed with nothing. All this satisfied the craving
that had driven him from home. Here he was one of the people, a man
amongst men, accepted at his face and physical value by fellow-creatures
who respected most the fearless eye and the strong arm. Moreover, there
were no signs of those hated forces, respectability, piety,
conventionality, all of which had seemed to range themselves
automatically on the side of his enemies.

He came to a large wooden hall with a row of lamps blazing along its
front and a foreign sign over the door. From within floated strains of
music and the beating of many feet. Jim entered. The place was crowded
with hairy diggers--mostly successful, he learned presently. The
atmosphere was heavy with smoke. A wild dance was going on, and several
sets held the floor. Half a dozen of the most fortunate of the men had
female partners, the others danced 'bucks,' man and man, and the pounding
of their heavy boots and the yells of laughter provoked by their clumsy
movements quite drowned the music of the feeble orchestra, crowded away
in the far corner of the room. Along one end ran an unplaned wooden
counter, where two or three barmen were kept busy serving gin, brandy,
and rum to the parched dancers. When the dance was ended there was a rush
for the bar, and Jim found now that dancing did not go by favour, the
hands of the fair being bestowed upon the highest bidders. One tall,
lack-haired, laughing girl, with the figure and face of a Bacchante,
sprang upon a chair, shaking aloft a yellow scarf, and was auctioned for
the next dance amidst a storm of bidding and a hurricane of merriment.
She was borne down the room in the arms of the triumphant digger, who had
paid thirty 'weights' for his bouncing partner--six pounds for ten
minutes' dancing, and the proud purchaser couldn't dance a step!

Jim watched the women curiously; they were a new type to him--young,
virile, red-lipped, flushed with wine, shameless in the face of the
crowd, their faces kindled with laughter. They led the men in their wild
revel--pagans absolute. One in particular attracted Done; she was tall,
dark-eyed, and black-haired. This, in conjunction with the bold
combination of red and black in her costume, gave him the belief that she
was Spanish. There was about her some suggestion of character and
strength that pleased him. She romped like a child; her merriment was
clean and unforced. He saw nothing of the corruption that Vice is
supposed to stamp upon the faces of her votaries. These women, despite
the feeble kerosene lights, the tobacco-smoke, and the bare, ugly walls,
might have been participants in the revels of Dionysus.

Several times, passing him in the dance, the eyes of the Spaniard flashed
into his own, and she smiled. When the dance was ended she confronted
him.

'Sure, you're goin' to dance wid me, ain't ye now?' she said in the most
mellifluous brogue.

Done shook his head and laughed with diffidence.

'No, thanks,' he said. 'I'm not a rich digger. Only a poor new chum,' he
added, hoping to carry conviction.

'Straight from the Ould Country, is it?' asked the girl eagerly. 'Have ye
the word of ould Ireland, an' how does she stand? The dance is yours for
the shmallest token.'

'I'm sorry I don't know Ireland,' said Jim.

'Then I'll give you the dance fer natural love an' affection.'

Done protested that he could not dance, but the laughing girl dragged him
into the thick of it.

'Come along!' she cried, dropping the brogue. 'I'm a patriot, and I love
you for the green in your eye.'

Jim danced. He was literally forced into it, and presently found himself
getting along quite decently in a barbaric sort of polka. When the music
ceased he followed the custom of the country, and shouted for his
partner. She drank sherry. He left the hall a few minutes later, with the
girl's kiss, lightly given, tingling on his lips, and walked away
quickly, treading on air. Presently he began to question himself. Why
this growing exuberance? Was it drink? Never before had he felt its
influence. He pulled himself together. He was crowding his sensation: it
was time to cry a halt.

The young man returned to the hotel where he had left his belongings. The
long bar was crowded with men. The hotel was little more than a large
tent with a pretentious wooden front. It was illumined by a single lamp
suspended above the counter. This lamp lit up the faces of the men
gathered under it, but beyond the countenances of the customers faded
into a mist of tobacco-smoke, deepening into darkness in the corners.

Done leant against the bar, watching the scene, still curious, content to
wait till the busy barman had leisure to attend to him. After a few
moments he found himself an object of most marked interest to a tall,
thin digger, perched on an up-ended barrel, drinking porter. The man was
watching him narrowly, and at length, as if to leave no doubt of his
attentions, he stepped down, and, standing squarely in front of Done,
looked him closely in the face. Jim returned the stare, finding curiosity
deepen into surprise, and surprise into conviction, in the countenance
confronting him.

'Solo!' cried the man. 'Solo, by all that's holy!' As he spoke he sprang
between Jim and the door way, as if to cut off escape. 'Bail up!' he
said; 'we've got you tight this trip.'

'You're making a mistake, I think, mate,' said Jim. 'Anyhow, my name is
not Solo.'

'That's a bluff! I know you too damn well! Boys,' continued the miner,
addressing the crowd, 'it's Solo. I'll wager my soul on it. Get at him!
There's five hundred cold guineas on his head!'

'I tell you you're wrong!' blurted Done.

The tall man waited for no further argument, but jumped at Done, and they
closed. There was a short struggle, and Jim put his opponent down with an
old Cousin-Jack trick that he had often tried on better men.

'The man's drunk!' said Jim, as the crowd narrowed in on him. He set his
back against the counter, prepared to make a good fight.

A raw-boned, brown-faced native of about twenty-six grappled with him, but
only as a pretence, as Done speedily found.

'Bolt, or you're a done man!' whispered the Australian at his ear. 'When
I smash the lamp, over the counter and under the tent, and skedaddle for
your life!'

This young fellow allowed himself to be thrown off, and backed into the
crowd. The long man, who had recovered his wind, turned to address the
men.

'It's Solo, mates,' he said, 'and there's five hundred waiting for us if
we take him.'

The men moved forward in a body, but just then a pewter crashed into the
lamp, and there was darkness. Acting on his new friend's advice, Done
cleared the counter at a bound, and dived under the canvas. Picking
himself up, he ran into the darkness. He heard footsteps following him,
and increased his pace, stumbling on the strange ground. But a voice
assured him.

'Keep to the right! Make for cover!' panted his pursuer.


VII

FINDING only one man following, Jim Done ceased running on reaching a
clump of trees, and presently he was joined by the young Australian who
had aided him.

'My colonial, you sprint like an emu!' gasped the latter. 'All the same,
that was a mad sort o' thing to do.'

'What was?'

'Why, showin' yourself 'bout here with the cheek of a dashed
commissioner, while there's five hundred on your head, hot or cold, live
or dead, an' every trooper in the country whim' to give his long ears to
pot you.'

'But you are quite wrong; I'm not this Solo.'

'Not Solo! That won't wash. Wasn't I there with Long Aleck when you got
away with the gold Hoban hid in our nosebag other side o' Geelong?'

'You're on the wrong scent. My name is Done. I'm a new chum, landed only
this morning off the Francis Cadman.'

'Here, let's look you over again.' The stranger struck a match, and,
shielding it with his hands, examined Jim's face. 'Dunno,' he said, 'but
p'r'aps you are a bit young. Still, rig a beard around that chiv of
yours, and it's Solo to the life.'

'If it's worth while, walk down to the ship with me, and I'll satisfy you
in two minutes.'

Your word's good enough for me. Solo or no, taint my deal.'

'Well, you've gone to some trouble to help me out of a hole, and I'm
obliged.' Done offered his hand, and the other shook it heartily. 'You
might tell me who and what this Solo is,' continued Jim.

'Smartest, coolest, most darin' gold-thief in Australia. Outlawed for
robbery under arms, wanted by all the police 'tween here and the Murray,
and his head's worth five hundred to you 'r me, 'r any yob that can rob
him of it. He works alone. What his right name is no one knows.'

'That's all a bright look-out for me!' laughed Jim. 'But if he's such an
infernal scoundrel, and he's robbed you among the rest, why come to his
rescue?'

''Pon my soul, I dunno I' replied the Australian, scratching his head
dubiously, ''less it's 'cause of his pluck 'n' the dashed pleasant,
gentlemanly way he has o' doin' things. By the way, what 're you out for?
Goin' diggin'? Got a mate? Where 're you makin'?'

'I'm going digging. I have no mate. I can't say what field I'm making for
till I know more about them.'

'Look here, take in my points.' The native struck another match, and held
it that Done might make an inventory of his perfections. 'Five foot ten
high, strong as a horse, sound in wind and limb, know the country, know
the game, been on three fields, want a mate. Name's Micah Wentworth
Burton--Mike for short. Got all traps, pans, shovels, picks, cradle, tub,
windlass, barrow. Long Aleck--chap that attacked you--was my mate; he's
turning teamster. Take me on, an' here's my hand. We're made for a pair.'

Burton stopped for lack of wind. He jerked his words with a slight nasal
intonation, and his manner and his action indicated a characteristic
impetuosity. Done was astounded at his own seeming good fortune and the
other's rash confidence.

'Come,' he said doubtingly, 'do you mean to say you'll go into
partnership in this desperate way with a man you don't know, but whom you
suspect of being a notorious rogue, and give him all the advantages of
your property and your knowledge?'

'Will I? My oath! Is it a deal? All that about Solo is off. I might 'a'
known he had too much horse-sense to mooch about Melbourne disguised only
in a daily shave. As for the rest, blast it! we're men. I take you on
chance, you take me on spec. We can look after ourselves, I s'pose. Well,
what say?'

'I couldn't ask for anything better. The only objection to the
arrangement is that I take all and give nothing.'

'Done, then! But don't you run away with a wrong idea. There 're heaps o'
decent men an' good miners in Melbourne who'd jump at a mate of your
stamp. Come along to my tent up Canvas Town to-night. There's a spare
bunk. Aleck started on a jamboree that won't mature for a week. We can
talk things into order.'

Jim Done awoke next morning with a fear in his heart that he had made a
fool of himself. His mate was sitting just without the tent, grilling
chops on a piece of hoop-iron twisted into a grid. Jim's head felt new to
him, and ached badly; old doubts, old prejudices, possessed him. Why
should all the regard this stranger expressed have developed in an
acquaintanceship of minutes? Why should Burton be so eager to bestow
benefits upon him? That was not the customary way of men. He got up,
dressed and washed, and took breakfast with his mate, and the sullen
suspicion lingered; but Mike talked volubly, questioning nothing, and as
the morning wore on his obvious sincerity won on Done, and ere they
turned their backs upon Melbourne the Australian's spontaneous, careless
confidence in him and his open-hearted cordiality planted in Done the
seeds of one of those strong, lasting friendships which are never half
expressed in words, although they may sometimes be attested in eloquent
and heroic actions.

On the afternoon of his second day in Melbourne Jim saw Lucy Woodrow once
more. She passed in Macdougal's trap as Done and his mate were walking
along Swanston Street. She looked very pretty, and was laughing gaily at
something her companion had said. The sight of that companion affected
Jim in a peculiar way. He looked a man of about forty, strongly but
sparely built; his face, clean-shaven but for the triangle of hair coming
just below the ears, had a cameo-like correctness of outline; the lips
were firm and full, the eyes deep. He wore one of the flat-brimmed
bell-toppers fashionable at the time, a skirted coat, and a high collar.
In a flash the whole man was photographed on Jim's mind--why he could not
understand. The sensations given him by the sight of that face were quite
apart from the pang he experienced on noting Lucy's apparent interest in
the man. Jim felt for the miniature in his pocket. It was hard to believe
that only about twenty-four hours had sped since their parting. Looking
back now over so much that was strange, he thought as many weeks might
have gone in the interval.

'Monkey Mack,' said Mike, following the direction of Jim's eyes.

'Do you know him?'

'Everybody knows of him. Owns the best-stocked station out of New South.
Made a pile through the rushes, selling stock at famine prices. Richest
squatter in Vic, an' that dirty mean he won't wash 'cause o' the ruinous
wear and tear on soap. Used to go round collecting the wool the sheep
scraped off on his fences an' trees, an' for years cadged his toby,
(tobacco, you know) off passing teamsters; then, when the teamsters shied
at him, gave up smokin'. Owns thousands of acres an' hundreds o'
thousands o' pounds, an' wears toe-rags, an' yet lets his wife have what
she likes, an' spend what she pleases. That was his wife 'long side him.'

'Yes, she came over in our ship.'

'Shipmates, eh? That's as good as first-cousins.'

'Who was the other man?'

'Donno. Looked like something just blown ashore. Very superior, likely.
Mrs Mack's got a weakness for gentility. She was a neighbourin'
squatter's milkmaid, they say.'

'Well, Macdougal's not mean in the matter of horseflesh.'

'Right. That's his other great extravagance. See, he gets about badly on
those spider-legs of his, and makes up for his misfortune when he splits
across a horse. He breeds the best, drives like a fiend, an' can ride
anythin' lapped in hide.'

A week later Done and Burton were on their way to Forest Creek diggings.
Everything worth working on Ballarat was pegged out, Mike said. Forest
Creek was the new Eldorado. Their tools and stores were four days ahead,
in the care of an experienced teamster whom Mike knew well, and whom he
could trust to pull through, despite the abominable roads and the
misfortunes that had knocked up many a well-found team and marked the
track with crippled horses and stranded wagons. For two days Jim had
carried his swag through the Australian Bush, and one night he had slept
on the brown grass, using his folded blanket for a pillow, the camp-fire
flickering palely at a distance, the wide-branching, dreamy gum-trees
spreading their limbs above him, the warmth of summer in the scented air
Already the instincts of the Bushman were developing in him. He began to
feel a friendship for the towering gums in their flaunting independence;
their proud individuality pleased him. To his mind they reflected the
spirit of the people--it must be the spirit of the land. Nowhere in their
feathery elegance did he find a law of conformity; each tree was a law
unto itself, tall and strong and slender, youthful and buoyant, opening
fond arms to the blue sky. The absence of the sap-greens of England
conveyed at first an impression of barrenness, but that wore off, and the
artistic side of his nature fed upon the soft harmonies of faded grass
and subdued green foliage nursing misty purples in its shade. The ground
was his bed and chair and table; never had he been so intimate with
Mother Earth. Here she was uncontaminated, the soil was sweet, and it
gave no hint of untold generations of dead fattening the grass upon which
he couched as in sweet hay. From the earth he drew an ardent patriotism.
He was already a more enthusiastic Australian than the loose-limbed
native with whom he fraternized.

They camped five miles beyond Miner's Rest on the second night,
preferring the comparative solitude of the Bush to the scant
accommodation and some what boisterous company at the shanty lately
established to cater for the fortune-hunters streaming to the new rushes.
Mike selected the spot and dropped his swag.

'We've tramped far enough to-day,' he said. 'You'll find water just over
that rise there. I'll light the fire.'

'So you've been over this part before,' said Jim, unstrapping the billy
from his mate's swag.

'No; this is new country to me.'

'Then, how do you know I shall find water beyond that hillock?'

''Pon my soul, I don't know why I know,' Mike answered; 'but I'll wager
my share of our first tub it's there.'

Jim found the water. There was a water-hole in a small creek at the spot
indicated. His mate's knowledge of things about him in the Bush, things
unseen and unheard, had seemed uncanny at first; he was getting used to
it now. Mike was born in the Bush, and the greater part of his life had
been spent in it. He knew it as thoroughly as its familiar animals did,
and much in the same way, without being aware of his knowledge, which was
mainly instinctive. The billy was on the blazing fire, and Done sat
watching Mike smartly mixing a damper in the lid. To Jim this, too, was a
wonderful accomplishment. Water and flour were deftly manipulated until a
ball of dough that quite filled the small lid resulted. It was done with
the cleanness and quickness of a conjuring trick. The dough was divided
into two pats, to be cooked under the hot ashes. Then Mike improvised his
wire grid again, and in a few minutes the steak he had carried in a
dilly-bag from Miner's Rest was sizzling and spitting over the embers.

Done's admiration for his mate was growing rapidly. Mike looked like a
model in new copper, kneeling by the fire, his face thrown back,
reflecting the glow of the flame in the surrounding dusk. Jim realized
what had gone to the making of that hard, lean frame, and, proud as he
was of his own strength, envied the other his endurance. He knew that
Burton had been making concessions to him throughout their journey, that
he could have walked miles further in the time without fatigue, carrying
his swag as jauntily as if it were a butterfly poised on his back. His
boyish exuberance of manner when stirred was in direct contrast to the
quiet assurance with which he went about ordinary affairs. He was never
in difficulties, never at a loss; the Bush was his living-room, bedroom,
and larder. He had already shown himself independent of what the stores
could provide when a meal was wanted. Mike might have been a pink Adonis
in another climate and under other conditions; his gray eyes and fair
moustache were in almost ludicrous contrast with his tanned hide--he
appeared to be bound in morocco.

After their meal Jim spread himself upon the ground, his head pillowed on
the swag, stretching his tired limbs. Mike sat smoking, and there was
silence over and about them. One of those brief hushes, when all the
night voices are stilled and the trees merge into black, motionless
masses, was upon the Bush, and it infected the men. All day they had
marched with the throng; their tramp had never been lonely, thousands of
men were moving upon Forest Creek, and every now and again they passed a
toiling party burdened with tools and utensils, or were passed in turn by
more enthusiastic spirits pushing on, eager for a share in the treasure
of Red Gully, Diamond Gully, and Castlemaine. The shouts of the joyous
travellers were still echoing in Done's ears.

He had seen diggers on the track under varying fortunes, cursing
dreadfully by broken-down teams, urging on their dull bullocks--slow, but
very sure--singing exuberantly as they paced by, carrying heavy swags
with light hearts, shouting as they went, under the impulse of a common
hope that begot friendliness in all; and yet each man was armed
now--there was a revolver or a pistol in every belt. They came out of the
Bush, and the Bush swallowed them again--strange groups. Two Jim passed
he recognised as sailors off the Francis Cadman: one was in the shafts of
a loaded wheel barrow, the other, with a rope over his shoulder, trudged
ahead, towing manfully, both as merry as boys at play, despite the ten
days' journey ahead of them.

'Good luck, mate!' 'Good luck!' The trees showered kindly wishes, and
hearty compliments danced from lip to lip. A spirit of irrepressible
jollity laughed in the land. Drays, waggons, buggies, cabs, vehicles of
all kinds, were pressed into the service of the adventurers. Four diggers
went roaring by in a dilapidated landau that had seen vice-regal service
in Hobart Town, driven by a fifth blackguard dressed in an old livery,
and they brandished champagne bottles, and scattered the liquid gold like
emperors--lucky pioneers from Buninyong. A ragged, bare-footed, hatless
urchin, a stowaway fresh from the streets of London, whipped behind, as
he might have done a few weeks earlier on a Bishop's carriage in Rotten
Row. The mates next encountered a band of Chinamen carrying their burdens
on bamboos, covering the ground smartly with their springing trot and
cackling gaily as they went; then a 'hatter,' drunk as a lord rolling
heavily, his hands in his pockets, his hat jauntily set on the back of
his head, bellowing the latest comic song, a lonely soul; then a dray,
piled high with cradles, pans, picks, shovels, swags, and a miscellaneous
cargo, on the top of which perched a bulky Irishwoman, going to the
diggings to make her fortune as the proprietress of the Forest Creek
Laundry. This and much more in the depths of a pathless forest, the grave
solitude of which was disturbed only for the moment as each jocund
company hastened on into the mysterious vastness ahead, or fell back into
the dense Bush that lay behind. That anybody could have a definite idea
whither he was going in this ocean of trees, that engulfed them all like
stones dropped into the sea, Done found it hard to believe.

'You're a curious kind of devil, Jim,' said Mike, who had been watching
Done closely during the last few minutes.

'How's that?'

'You don't talk. Worse still, you don't smoke.'

'No; in England I had neither mates nor friends, and smoking's a
convivial disease--a kid catches it from his companions.'

'I might have guessed you were bred a "hatter"; you're as dumb as a
mute.'

'Same reason, Mike; but I'm getting over it. I'm getting over a good many
things rather too suddenly. I'm sort of mentally breathless. A year ago
I'd have sworn that friendship and good-fellowship were impossible to me.'

'Go on!'

'And just now I'm feeling things too keenly to talk much about them.'

''Nough said, Jimmy; I ain't complaining.' Mike knocked the ashes from his
pipe on his boot. 'I s'pose I'd best get somethin' for breakfast,' he
said, rising and stretching himself.

'What, here?' Jim looked about him into the darkness.

'Here or hereabouts. Keep an eye on the swags. I won't be gone more'n an
hour at the outside.'

Micah Burton went off into the dense Bush, that to Jim looked grimly
unpromising, and the latter lay back upon the grass again, with quite a
luxurious sensation. The hard day's walking made this rest peculiarly
agreeable: he had eaten well, his mind was at peace--he no longer
concerned himself with psychological theories--he was content to live and
feel.

Sharply out of the silence came a ringing report. Jim was jerked to a
sitting posture, listening with all his ears. The report was repeated
several times, a fusillade of shots, followed by faint echoes of a voice
raised in anger. There was an interval of quiet, and when the sound broke
in again Done sighed contentedly, and relapsed into his former position.
He recognised the crack of a cattle-whip. In a minute or two he heard the
voice of the bullocky admonishing Bally and Spot with a burst of
alliterative invective, and presently the leaders came labouring out of
the darkness, the great red bullocks, with bowed heads, moving slowly and
with that suggestion of impassive invincibility that goes always with a
big team of good working bullocks in action.

'Hello, mate!' cried someone beyond in the shadows.

'Hello, there!'

'Plenty o' water 'bout?'

'A creek down to the left.'

'Right-o! We'll camp here, Stony. Woa, Strawberry! Woa, there, Spot!
Bally! Blackboy!'

The cattle came to a standstill, and while the others busied themselves
unyoking the team, one man went off through the trees, and presently
returned, carrying a billy he had just filled. He kicked the fire
together, threw on a few pieces of wood, and began to prepare a meal,
paying no attention to Jim, who lay watching him. It was not customary to
say 'By your leave!' in little matters of this kind. On the track every
man's company was supposed to be welcome. Following a habit of
observation, Jim examined the man without curiosity. He was thin,
sandy-haired, and wiry, about forty-five, with restless hands, and a
cowed, half-sullen expression--a drinker of strong drinks of the kind
manufactured at the shanties, corrosive liquids that ate the souls out of
men in quick order.

Having disposed of the bullocks, the tinkling of whose bells was a
foreign note in the night, two others came to the fire, carrying the
tucker-box. They were brothers, long, bearded, brown-faced Australians of
the runs, going up to the rush with stores for Coolan and Smith, or
Aberdeen, the universal providers of the Roaring Fifties.

'Hurry up that blasted quart-pot, Stony!' ejaculated the elder of the
two. 'I feel as if I'd done a three days' perish-me!'

The men ate hungrily, sitting about in the light of the fire, drinking
the hot tea from pannikins and from the billy lid, and as they ate they
talked. Done was beginning to find himself at home in the society of men.
The humanities were finding place in his soul. Everything about these
people interested him--their work, their pleasures, their ideas. They
were so closely in touch with vital things, so tolerant. They cherished
no political, social, and religious convictions to the exclusion of their
fellow-men.

Burton returned, swinging four featherless birds. The invasion of their
camp did not surprise him. He greeted the strangers cheerfully, and held
the birds up for Jim's inspec