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The mates overtook the carter with their tent and stores and tools within a day's journey of the rush, and pushed on to secure a claim. Done's first sight of a busy goldfield was gained on a clear, sunny morning, when, after passing through Sawpit Gully, they came upon the beginning of the long lead that comprised many rushes, known as Forest Creek.
A confusion of startled protests rose; the two miners burst out indignantly; but O'Neil, raising his voice for the first time, managed to make himself heard. "Those jewelry samples came from Nevada," he cried. "I recognized them myself this afternoon, and here's another fellow who can't be fooled. Thorn told you he used to work in Goldfield. You can draw your own conclusions."
Prospecting for alluvial gold at shallow depths is a comparatively easy process, requiring no great amount of technical knowledge. Usually the first gold is got at or near the surface and then traced to deep leads, if such exist. At Mount Brown Goldfield, N.S.W., in 1881, I saw claimholders turning out to work equipped only with a small broom made of twigs and a tin dish.
As we approached this already great and busy goldfield, when the hum of its business life was just breaking upon our ears, but without any other disturbing intrusion to interfere with the universally indigenous scene, a large kangaroo the "old man," or largest species started up amongst the gum-tree underwood a little ahead of us, and bounded away in magnificent style.
Little Rivers was so out of the way that other promoters had overlooked it, and everybody had sort of taken it for granted that Jasper Ewold and his water users' association really had legal possession. It was my chance. I thought big. That dam should be mine. I had the money I had made in Goldfield, but it was not enough for my purpose.
She had a splendid voice, and used to sing 'Madeline'. There might have been one or two bad women before that, in the Oracle's world, but no cold-blooded, designing ones. He calls the bad ones 'unfortunate'. "Perhaps it was Tom's looks, or his freshness, or his innocence, or softness or all together that attracted her. Anyway, he got mixed up with her before the goldfield petered out.
Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were poilus bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from the labourer or the employer from the peasant. Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan goldfield in '97-8 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had happened to these men.
A large population had been hurriedly gathered in an isolated region, without provisions, or the possibility of obtaining them; their expectations of the goldfield had been disappointed, and for some time the Fitzroy River was one great scene of misery and starvation till the Governments of New South Wales and Victoria sent vessels to convey the unfortunate diggers away from the place.
Kellerman, who was a man of powerful physique, had succeeded in reaching a beche-de-mer station on the coast, where for six or eight months he worked steadily and made a little money. From there he went to a newly-discovered alluvial goldfield north of Cooktown with a prospecting party, who all spoke well of him as "a plucky, energetic fellow, and a good mate."
Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particular formation; it ran in porphyry, he said, and then he ran into mineralogy too technical for me now. I repeated his statement, however, and saw Casey grin tolerantly. "Gold is where yuh find it," he retorted, and spat after a hurrying lizard. "They said gold couldn't be found in that formation around Goldfield. But they found it, didn't they?"
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