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Updated: May 13, 2025
This surrender had no sooner been made than every man outside was her champion. "You will ride on that back seat to Gumbolt to-night, or I'll ride in Jim Digger's hearse. I am layin' for him anyhow." The voice was Jake Dennison's. "And I'll ride with him. Stand aside, Jake, and let me git in there. I'll yank him out," said his friend.
It happened a week or two ago that I found a hulking fellow with a digger's beard and a red shirt one of those chaps we've seen lately back from Ballarat and Geelong skulking about outside the gate. I asked him what he wanted, and he was drunk and abusive, and well, I had to give him a hiding. 'Yes, said the General, 'you had to give him a hiding. Why? 'I've told you, sir, Polson stammered.
It seemed a most commodious little building compared to the insecure shelter of' a digger's tent. The sides of the hut were formed of slabs, which were made mostly from the stringy bark, a tree that splits easily the roof was composed of the bark from the same tree; the chimney was of stones mortared together with mud. This is the general style of building for shepherds' huts in the bush.
Hence he brooded a good deal as he went about his work, and cogitated deeply in a manner which was once again distinctly undesirable in so very intelligent a subordinate. These broodings and cogitations culminated in a meeting, which was held by him with his two sub-agents in the private parlour of the Digger's Retreat.
'Simple as striking matches, said Dave Regan, Bushman; 'but it gave me the biggest scare I ever had except, perhaps, the time I stumbled in the dark into a six-feet digger's hole, which might have been eighty feet deep for all I knew when I was falling. 'It was the night of the day after the Queen's birthday.
Without flocks and herds or domestic fowls, theirs was the constant toil of the cultivator. Their taro and their kumara fields had to be dug, and dug thoroughly with wooden spades. Long-handled and pointed at the end, these implements resembled stilts with a cross-bar about eighteen inches from the ground on which the digger's foot rested. Two men worked them together.
A little later they set to work, puddling the best of the wash dug out in the course of sinking; and then the debris was put through the cradle, and Jim awoke at last to the full zest of the digger's lust.
Presently the digger's foot was approached, and evidently approved of for its warmth. After a retreat to the rock a farther advance was made, this time to the knee of the stranger, to whose face the two brilliant little eyes were still enquiringly directed.
At one o'clock that day there were but eight Europeans and one black boy left on the once noisy Chinkie's Flat the landlord of "The Digger's Best," six miners, Grainger, and the black boy, "Jacky," who had accompanied him on his arduous journey from the Batavia River.
"The township" was one of the usual Queensland mining type, a dozen or so of bark-roofed humpies, a public-house with the title of "The Digger's Best," a blacksmith's forge, and a quartz-crushing battery.
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