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Updated: September 29, 2025
For nearly six weeks they worked on, always with success, until the gold they had won filled several canvas bags they made for it, and amounted to as heavy a load as the four horses could carry, in addition to the three men and their swags and stores. Leaving Palmer Billy comfortable in camp, Peters, Tony, and Murray started for Birralong.
"You'll have to tell her or I shall." "She's only cranky," Dickson answered in the same tone. "She's dotty half her time and scotty the other." The Three-mile, where Slaughter lived Cold-blood Slaughter, as they termed him, from his pessimistic, cynical manner of thought and speech was an out-of-the-way spot even for the district of Birralong.
Now the situation was different. As they toiled and slaved along Boulder Creek, when they thought of Birralong at all it was to heap upon it and its inhabitants the scorn they considered was justly earned by a settlement which looked at a miner askance, and from whence stores, for years past, had been unobtainable save on a cash basis.
Then Dickson told her that he had heard Tony had gone back to the diggings, and she attributed his not returning to the station to that cause. Later there came words of the gathering of the diggers at Birralong, and Dickson, who was often away, at the township, he said, brought word of Tony's return.
He told her all about the rich patch of gold-bearing gravel they had struck in the creek, and the way they had worked it out so as to be able to get to Birralong for Christmas, but only to find themselves stranded almost before their holidays began, and with all the work to do over again, to say nothing of the finding of a new claim. "And you are starting out again to-morrow?" she said.
It was that which was puzzling Birralong. The last man in the district whom they expected to be carried away by the glib tales of nuggets by the bucketful and gravel running two ounces to the dish, was Tony Taylor; still less did they expect that he would leave his selection home, to say nothing of the charms of Birralong and Marmot's verandah, for a wild-cat yarn of travelling fossickers.
For some time the combined population of Birralong wondered, until, indeed, Ailleen rushed down from the cottage, where her father lay, to the roadway in front of the school, where the inhabitants of the township stood, and taunted them with being heartless cowards and listless fools to ignore the pleadings of a dying man.
The charred ruins of the Three-mile, and the shallow waterhole beside the hut, revealed enough to put to shame the scandal that had been laid on Slaughter's shoulders, and for that alone Birralong, collectively, acknowledged the blame of a grievous fault. But there was more than mere acknowledgment of error needed to balance accounts.
The interest of Birralong commenced with the alarm Murray and Murray's wife experienced with regard to Nellie. With a big family and a small selection, there was neither time nor inclination on their part to mince matters, and Nellie had been questioned severely and pointedly.
The tucker might be getting scarce; but what of that? A few hours' work and one of them could ride away back to Birralong to clear off the score they had left and bring more stores, more horses, more anything they wanted whatever it was, in a week it would be paid for. The gold was at their feet; the strength to win it in their muscles; the craving for possession in their minds.
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