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Pete Quigley had two or three hard-won battles to his credit, and it was thought there was no man on the field so hard to handle, with the exception of Ben Kyley, whose showing against a professional of Bendigo's calibre set him on a plane above the mere amateur. Pete confessed himself beaten without equivocation. 'I ain't got any patience with this blanky new fangled style o' fightin', he said.
Farmer Dickson shook his bottle, and looked at it very dubiously. "It seems t' me it's all the same mixture," he said. "It looks like it, tastes like, 'n' it smells like. Now I come t' think iv it, I ain't too sure 'bout these blanky rheumatics o' mine." He reached down his back and rubbed himself anxiously. "I thought my diabetes was a-movin', but they're all back at me agin," said Coleman.
'My God, Hardin! he screams 'Ger off o my ship! Ger off o my ship! "'Pardon, my lord, says I. 'I've done my dooty as a man, though I may have exceeded it as a sailor! "He called me a blanky pit boy. "'A pit boy I was, my lord, says I, 'and not ashamed on it; and powder-monkey to Hawke afoor your lordship was born. For nigh on fifty years I've touched the King's pay, and ate the King's salt.
I thought, perhaps, my city rig or manner embarrassed him, so I stuck my hands in my pockets, spat, and said, to set him at his ease: "It's blanky hot to-day. I don't know how you blanky blanks stand such blank weather! It's blanky well hot enough to roast a crimson carnal bullock; ain't it?" Then I took out a cake of tobacco, bit off a quarter, and pretended to chew. He replied: "My oath!"
'They'll make a good fight of it when the swaddies do come, he said cheerfully, as they settled down in their blankets. 'My oath! replied Mike. 'But we were chumps to give up our revolvers. What good can a man do pokin' round in the dark with a blanky spike? The men lay with their primitive weapons in their hands.
"It seemed to me," Jim Bullock said afterwards, "that Peter was only tryin' to make some of us blanky well blubber." "And there are men," Peter went on, "who have struggled and suffered and failed, and who have fought and failed again till their tempers are spoiled, until they grow bitter.
"What was they like?" asks the boss. "Like?" shouted Poisonous, swearin' all the time. "One was a blanky long, sandy, sawny feller, and the other was a short, slim feller with black hair. Your blanky men knows all about them because they had the blanky billy o' beer." "Now, what's this all about, you chaps?" sez the boss to us. 'So we told him as much as we knowed about them two fellers.
Eventually the great showman left the town in something of a hurry to escape notoriety that promised to be dangerous, but he had done a record six-days' business, and was content. "But how'd yeh beat the blanky gorilla?" asked the Living Skeleton on the morning after the rescue, as the Missing Link sat in his cage munching preserved fruits presented to him in abundance by the grateful Kit See.
"Do you think I'm a blanky fool?" said Jack, and I shut up. The shanty was kept by a man who went by the name of Thomas, a notorious lamber-down,* as I found out afterwards.
You'd think from the way he talks that a man's life was hanging on the whiskers of a half-second. Blanky rot, I call it." "I wouldn't mind so much," said another gunner, "if ever he thought to say we done it good, but not 'im. The better we does it and the faster, the better and the faster he wants it done.
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