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"Well, besides your three horses, there's been an odd team now an' agen for the fortnit or three weeks I been here. Good many last night. Rallyin'-up to-night. No business o' mine. Too busy shiftin' mullock to know what's goin' on. Way o' the world, I s'pose.
For the Chinamen knew that those dry and dusty heaps of mullock and grey and yellow sand, on which the death adder and the black-necked tiger snake now coiled themselves to sleep in the noon-day sun, still contained gold enough to reward patient industry industry of which the foreign-devils were not capable when the result would be but five pennyweights a day, washed out in the hot waters of the creek under a sky of brass, "with flour at two-pounds-ten per 50 lb. bag," as Dick Scott said.
And these two old fifty-niners would mooch round and sit on their heels on the sunny mullock heaps and break clay lumps between their hands, and lay plans for the putting down of shafts, and smoke, till an urchin was sent to "look for his father and Mr So-and-so, and tell 'em to come to their dinner."
One may often see in hard country stupid fellows wasting time, labour, and explosives in sinking huge excavations as much as 10 ft. by 8 ft. in solid rock, sometimes following down 6 inches of quartz. When your shaft is sunk a few feet, you should begin to log up the top for at least 3 ft. or 4 ft., so as to get a tip for your "mullock" and lode stuff.
You get it full of wash dirt, squat down at a convenient place at the edge of the water-hole, where there is a rest for the dish in the water just below its own depth. You sink the dish and let the clay and gravel soak a while, then you work and rub it up with your hands, and as the clay dissolves, dish it off as muddy water or mullock.
Later on, when most of the diggers had gone, and Isley's mother was dead, he was to be seen about the place with bare, sunbrowned arms and legs, a pick and shovel, and a gold dish about two-thirds of his height in diameter, with which he used to go "a-speckin'" and "fossickin'" amongst the old mullock heaps.
'The bag's there under them lumps. Dick held his candle low, throwing its light into the shaft. Downy dropped from the slabs placed across from drive to drive into the bottom, and going on his knees threw aside the lumps of mullock indicated by the boy. Dick followed him holding the candle, and watching his movements, anxiously at first, and then with terror.
The finer gravel and the mullock goes through and down over a sloping board covered with blanket, and with ledges on it to catch the gold. The dish was mostly used for prospecting; large quantities of wash dirt was put through the horse-power 'puddling-machine', which there isn't room to describe here. ''Ello, Dave! said Pinter, after looking with mild surprise at the size of Dave's waste-heap.
The manager took time to digest this, and then asked: "What was the song?" "Oh, that was an old song we used to sing at the Dublin University," said the doctor. During his sober days Bogg used to fossick about among the old mullock heaps, or split palings in the bush, and just managed to keep out of debt.
This was a mining town called Fig Tree Mount why, nobody could tell, for there were no fig trees, and not a sign of a hill as far as the level horizon except for the heaps of refuse mullock that showed where shafts had been sunk.
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