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Then the occupier for the time being had some chance of making a profit on the year's occupation; but otherwise, no one but a new chum would grant credit for drinks against such payment in kind as cut timber and split rails for a whole settlement of fossickers.
There were paddocks round the Rest and calico enough for a hundred tents in Marmot's store, and with gold in their pockets, the fossickers of Boulder Creek asked for nothing more in the way of shelter.
The remainder of the fossickers, also profiting by the judgment and also by the example, scurried right and left to their respective claims, and from the safety of their own ground proffered advice, picturesque and soothing, to Palmer Billy, who was arguing and gesticulating violently to the man who had jumped his claim.
The "Welcome Stranger," a still larger mass of gold, was found amongst the roots of a tree at Dunolly, Victoria, in 1869, by two starved out "fossickers" named Deeson and Oates.
Behind these came the great army of fossickers, washers of surface-dirt, equipped with knives and tin-dishes, and content if they could wash out half-a-pennyweight to the dish. At their heels still others, who treated the tailings they threw away. And among these last was a sprinkling of women, more than one with an infant sucking at her breast.
The name of Marmot did not rank high with the fossickers when funds were low, and the joys of the Carrier's Rest were only known to the man who had "struck it" from time to time in the creek; but the aloofness of Cudlip's Rest the previous Christmas still rankled, and, not for any special admiration or respect for it, Birralong was chosen as the scene of the coming festivities.
Golden Gully had its little community of fossickers who lived in a clearing called Spencer's Flat on one side and Pounding Flat on the other, but they lent no life to the scene; they only haunted it.
The population is very variable; the surrounding district contains some fifty or sixty fossickers, who come into town at intervals to get fresh supplies of flour and salt beef the one and only diet of the bushmen in these parts, who, though very rarely seeing vegetables, are for the most part strong and healthy.
There were other residents in the township besides these two; men who came along the road from the east to the west, some with business and some in search for it; some with a record they wanted to leave behind, and some with an empty past they hoped to turn into a well-filled future in the mighty plains of the rolling lands of the virgin western country; men of all qualities and shades of vice and virtue; stockmen, mailmen, and drovers; stray gold-seekers, fossickers, or prospectors; swagsmen who were bonâ-fide bushmen, and swagsmen who, as sundowners, only arrived at a station or a township too late in the day to be given work, but not too late to participate in the open hospitality of the bush; shepherds, selectors seeking land, and timber-getters moving on to the scrubs of the table-land beyond the creek; but men, always men, who brought the population of the township up to tens, but never yet to hundreds, and who in a few days had gone further west mostly and whose places were taken by others.
Hastening back to the camp, he reached there just as the last of the fossickers, moving away from the fire, gave rise to Gleeson's remark. "Some one's lifted the horses in the night and ridden them down the hill," he explained, as he came up. "Here's the hobbles, and the tracks are quite plain. There were two men, and they led two of the horses.
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