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The town was surrounded by mountains, and prospect holes and abandoned placer diggings could be seen in every direction, while interspersed among the business blocks of brick and stone, were tiny cabins, built of logs, all relics of the earlier days when Silver City was but a large mining camp.
With these two chance companions we entered into a sort of partnership; for some months after reaching the diggings we all worked together. On our way through the Orange Free State we saw immense herds of springbuck and an occasional herd of blesbuck and wildebeeste. As we were badly armed, very little game fell to our guns.
Thebes, which, during the day, is almost animate by reason of the presence of the visitors and the gangs of fellahs who, singing the while, are busy at the diggings and the clearing away of the rubbish, has emptied itself little by little, while the blue shadows were mounting from the base of the monstrous sanctuaries.
"She is queer," said Archie, "certainly." "Queer! By George, I'll back her for the queerest bit of horseflesh going any way about these diggings. I thought she was mad at first, but I believe she knows what she's about." "She knows what she's about well enough.. She's worth all the money if you can only get her to work." "Bosh, my dear fellow." "Why bosh? What's up now?" "Bosh! Bosh! Bosh!
As evening approached, our new acquaintances became very sociable, and amused us with their account of the diggings; and the subject of licensing being naturally discussed, led to our being initiated into the various means of evading it, and the penalties incurred thereby.
Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late years, a drop of from twenty millions down to four or five, there is little visible decay in its trade, and despite stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska, there is no marked visible diminution in its population, though as a matter of fact both must have largely fallen off.
There were six of them altogether, tall wiry men all of them; they'd mostly been hunters and trappers in the Rocky Mountains before the gold was struck at Suttor's Mill, in the Sacramento Valley. They had been digging in '49 in California, but had come over when they heard from an old mate of a placer diggings at Turon, richer than anything they had ever tried in America.
Then she turned, and with swift, noiseless feet sped up the back trail. Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck was just preparing for bed. Bored by the duties put upon her by society, her wealth, and widowed blessedness, she had journeyed into the Northland and gone to housekeeping in a cosey cabin on the edge of the diggings.
By kindness and ingenuity of Chief Engineer Tucker he now occupies a tin house with a wonderful mansard roof, from which he issues every afternoon for an aerial constitutional, giving us a fright occasionally with a flight over far a-sea, but always returning safely enough to his new diggings.
From thence they had managed, by fair means and foul, to work their way to other places, and had latterly been living in the Middle Island, earning what they could by horse-breaking and divers odd jobs. But your true convict hates work with a curiously deadly hatred, and these four men agreed to go and look round them at the new West Coast diggings.
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