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We were all the more contented, though, when we heard the row of the cradles and the clang and bang of the stampers in the quartz-crushing batteries again, and saw the big crowd moving up and down like a hill of ants, the same as when we'd left Turon last. As soon as we got into the main street we parted.
I could manage to make to the farm where the sorrel was at grass with a lot of other diggers' horses. If I could get a saddle and catch the old horse I could put many a mile between me and them before sundown. I stood still when I reached the top of the bluff, partly to get breath and partly to take a last look at old Turon.
A passage from Dick Marston's account of what he saw at Turon is worth reproducing here as characteristic of the author's representation of a gold-fields community and as a sample of his humour. The 'three honourables, of whom the disguised bushranger captain is one, are together in a hotel.
Starlight's presence at dinner with the gold-fields commissioner and police magistrate at Turon, when 'in walked Inspector Goring, the officer who had been so long and patiently seeking him elsewhere, and his appearance at Bella Barnes' wedding, after a reward of a thousand pounds has been offered for his capture, are scenes which remain vivid in the memory long after the more commonplace adventures of the lords of Terrible Hollow have lost their distinctness or been forgotten.
She would cook his meals and mend his clothes, and they would come into town on Saturday nights only and be as happy as kings and queens. She didn't come up to dance or flirt, she said, in a place like Turon, and if Jim didn't get a home for her she'd go back to her dressmaking at St. Kilda. This woke up Jim, so he bought out a miner who lived a bit out of the town.
'I didn't suppose anything, says I, 'but that we were going to clear out the safest way we could. If we're to do the swell business we'd better do it apart, or else put an advertisement into the "Turon Star" that Starlight, Marston, and Co. are giving up business and going to leave the district, all accounts owing to be sent in by a certain date. 'A first-rate idea, says he.
He was a dark horse, sure enough; dark in colour, and dark enough as to his performances nobody knew much about them. We weren't going to enter him in his right name, of course. Old Jacob was a queer old fellow in all his ways and notions, so we couldn't stable him in any of the stables in Turon, for fear of his being 'got at', or something.
It was the very picture of what I'd read about an army in camp lines of tents and a crowd of men all spread out over a bit of land hardly big enough for a flock of sheep. Now and then a dog would bark now a revolver would go off. It was never quiet on Turon diggings, day or night. Well, there they all were, tents and diggers, claims and windlasses, pumps and water-wheels.
As for shooting in cold blood, I'm not on, and so I tell you. 'I suppose you think you and Starlight's going to boss the lot of us, because you've been doing it fine at the Turon races along with a lot of blasted swells as 'ud scrag us if they had the chance, and we're to take so much a head for our dashed lives, because we're only working chaps. Not if Dan Moran knows it.
This was easy to know, because the escort returns were printed in all the newspapers every week; so everybody could see for themselves what pounds and hundredweights and tons yes, tons of gold were being got by men who very often, as like as not, hadn't to dig above twenty or thirty feet for it, and had never handled a pick or a shovel in their lives before they came to the Turon.
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