Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/101

Rh, and possibly a year in a Dutch prison before you're brought to trial! Or would you do a pearling trip in less exciting but more honest fashion? Would you ship aboard a lugger with five good companions, and go a-cruising down the New Guinea coast, working hard all day long, and lying out on deck at night, smoking and listening to the lip-lap of the water against the counter, and spinning yarns of all the world?"

"What else?"

"Why, what more do you want? Do you hanker after a cruise aboard a stinking bêche-de-mer boat inside the Barrier Reef, or a run with the sandal-wood cutters or tortoiseshell gatherers to New Guinea; or do you want to go ashore again and try an overlanding trip half across the continent, riding behind your cattle all day long, and standing your watch at night under dripping boughs, your teeth chattering in your head, waiting for the bulls to break, while every moment you expect to hear the Bunyip calling in that lonely water-hole beyond the fringe of Mulga scrub?"

"You make me almost mad with longing."

"And yet, somehow, it doesn't seem so fine when you're at it. It's when you come to look back upon it all from a distance of twelve thousand miles that you feel its real charm. Then it calls you to return in every rustle of the leaves ashore, in the blue of the sky, in the ripple of the waves at sea. And it eats into your heart, so that you begin to think you'll never be happy till you're back in the old tumultuous devil-may-care existence again."

"What a life you've led. And how much better it seems than the dull monotony of our existence here in sleepy old England."

"Don't you believe it. If you wanted to change I