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Updated: May 12, 2025
One of them, to whom the warning woman belonged, raised his head and called a Chinese word at her; she obeyed it instantly, vanished into thin air; the rest went impassively on with their fossicking. They were not such fools as to try to cheat the Government of its righteous dues. None but had his licence safely folded in his nosecloth, and thrust inside the bosom of his blouse.
They had had faith in the creek for years without seeing more than specks of gold faith so great that they would all have scorned to leave their shafts and drives for the sake of fossicking neighbouring streams and gullies. But payable alluvial and plenty of it only twenty miles away! They needed time to take that in all at once. "I found it a month ago I and some mates.
Old brick chimneys and houses, the clay for the bricks of which had been taken from sites of subsequent goldfields, had been put through the crushing-mill in subsequent years and had yielded 'payable gold'. Fossicking Chinamen were said to have been the first to detect a case of this kind.
I was quite certain about this, for my eye had grown quick to note espionage, and it is harder for a spy to hide in the spare bush of the flats than in the dense thickets on these uplands. The watchers, then, did not mind my fossicking round their sacred place. Why, then, was I so closely watched in the harmless neighbourhood of the store? I thought for a long time before an answer occurred to me.
It was wonderful how much she know. She knew when she was wanted; and she would go away the night before and get lost. And she knew when she was n't wanted; then she'd hang about the back-door licking a hole in the ground where the dish-water was thrown, or fossicking at the barn for the corn Dad had hidden, or scratching her neck or her rump against the cultivation paddock slip-rails.
For an hour or two each day Harry was fossicking in the creek on the spot where Frank had been working, with the idea of satisfying himself whether or not such gold as Frank had sold was obtainable there; and here the searcher's daughter came upon him one morning shortly after the incident of the Sunday School.
"He told me he and four others had just returned to Auckland after putting in six weeks among the volcanic beaches of the North Island, searching 'fossicking, he called it for fine gold. These black sand volcanic beaches are common in parts of New Zealand. The black sand is derived from the crystals of magnetic iron, and there is frequently a fair amount of fine gold mingled with them.
Oncet," he drawled slowly, with a slight Southern accent, but in a manner that betokened a speech acquired by association rather than the natural tongue. "He was a feller that came out to shoot big game up in the hills. I ain't seen him sence, sure. Guess nobody did." He looked away sadly. "We heerd tell of him. Guess he got fossicking after b'ar. The wind was blowin' ter'ble.
Anyhow, since you have been gone, we have been fossicking about, and there is no doubt about the gold; it is the richest place any of us have ever seed." "Have you found water, Dave?" "No, that is the one thing bad, we shall have to go out to fetch water, but maybe if we dig in the center of the channel we shall find it.
Occasionally a man would come down the road who perhaps had not seen so much civilization for years before; who had, perhaps for years, been away in some outlying portion of the outlying West, boundary riding round a paddock or stock riding on a station; or, perchance, fossicking up and down the gullies of broken country under the mistaken idea that the specks and grains of gold he found, and which just kept him in "tucker," would lead him some day to a mighty reef which would make him a millionaire in a night; but who, in all those years, had drunk nothing but tea or water, and eaten nothing but beef and damper, living a glorious, free, untrammelled life, with the scent of the eucalypt ever in his nostrils and the pure, clear air of the bush ever in his lungs.
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