Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 31, 2025
When Tony reached the township he found it practically deserted. The men who had struggled to stop the spread of the flames at Marmot's the night before were already away at the big blaze, the site of which was marked by a great column of smoke, rolling, whirling, and folding against the clear blue of the cloudless sky.
And the men who gathered on Marmot's verandah to settle all the problems and the squabbles of the locality, met to marvel and to wonder; for they who, in their wisdom, had anticipated all things; they who had solved all questions affecting the welfare of the district; they who had laid bare the skeleton of every secret for miles around had met and heard, in painful and perplexed silence, the story of a greater secret than they had yet encountered, and a secret beside which, as it were, they had been living for months past without even dreaming of its existence.
"Yes; but here, hold on," he exclaimed as, with a wave of her hand, just as she had waved it to the group on Marmot's verandah, the girl started her horse up the narrow pathway that led past the school-house into the paddock behind the cottage where she and her father, the schoolmaster, lived. The youth looked after her, with something of a glitter in his watery blue eyes.
Many a story of that kind had already been told in Birralong, both at the Rest and on Marmot's verandah, and the Birralong folk were sceptical, especially those who on former occasions had been induced, on the strength of the story, to furnish stores on credit, or take a contributing interest in the newly found claim; in either case receiving in return only the knowledge that, even in matters connected with gold-mining, humanity is sometimes frail.
As a general rule, these related to the domestic and private affairs of neighbours, and it was said that if any one had a doubt as to the course which events and circumstances were taking with him, he had only to ascertain what was said on Marmot's verandah; every one's business was known better there than to the persons whom it mostly concerned.
Any one entering or leaving the bar stepped over him as he lay, so as not to disturb him while he was "sleeping it off" in the cool; and possibly some looked down on him with pity, and some with contempt, while yet others were moved to envy and exultant admiration. But generally the township went to Marmot's rather than to the Rest generally.
The bear lay perhaps a hundred feet from the marmot's home, and the marmot had fed perhaps forty feet from it a distance he could quickly cover if the visitor showed unfriendly symptoms. But there were no symptoms. It was all over so quickly that I was left dazed and breathless. There was a small bowlder about four feet high in the midst of a tiny hayfield where the marmot fed.
When they arrived at Marmot's, early in the afternoon, they found him on the verandah with Murray, while the latter's horse, still sweating, was hitched up to one of the posts in front. "My word! you've come along at a pace," Marmot exclaimed, as they rode up. "Murray here was saying " "Where's the use of wasting time when you've struck it?"
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.
"It'll do for short," Taylor said. "We'll name him Richard Taylor, and call him Tony for short." Marmot's store stood at the end of Birralong, at the top of the township road, which was, in reality, the main road, along the sides of which Birralong had sprung up.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking