Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/100

 and left of you, with the constant roar of sluice boxes and cradles, the creak of windlasses, the perpetual noise of human voices. There's the excitement of pegging out your claim and sinking your first shaft, wondering all the time if it will turn up trumps or nothing. There's the honest, manly labour from dawn to dusk. And then, when daylight fails, and the lamps begin to sparkle over the field, songs drift up the hillside from the drinking shanties in the valley, and you and your mate weigh up your day's returns, and, having done so, turn into your blankets to dream of the monster nugget you intend to find upon the morrow. Isn't that real life for you?"

He did not answer, but there was a sparkle in his eyes that told me I was understood.

"Then if you want other sorts of enterprise, there is Thursday Island, where I hail from, with its extraordinary people. Suppose we wander down the Front at nightfall, past the Kanaka billiard saloons and the Chinese stores, into, say, the Hotel of All Nations. Who is that handsome, dark, mysterious fellow, smoking a cigarette and idly flirting with the pretty bar girl? You don't know him, but I do! There's indeed a history for you. You didn't notice, perhaps, that rakish schooner that came to anchor in the bay early in the forenoon. What lines she had! Well, that's his craft. To-morrow she'll be gone, it is whispered, to try for pearl in prohibited Dutch waters. Can't you imagine her slinking round the islands, watching for the patrolling gunboat, and ready, directly she has passed, to slip into the bay, skim its shell, and put to sea again. Sometimes they're chased—and then?"

"What then?"

"Well, a clean pair of heels or trouble with the