Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/163

 Silent and cold, we stumbled and jogged along, something after the fashion of Lord Scamperdale going to meet the hounds in the next county, for an hour or two. Then the sun began to cheer the sodden landscape, the birds chirped, the cattle put their heads down, life's mercury rose.

We had reached the historic Yuille's Creek, upon the bank of which the great gold city now stands. Then it was like any other 'wash-up creek'—a mimic river in winter, a chain of muddy water-holes in summer. As I looked at the eager waters, yellow with the clay in solution, as if the great metal had lent the wave its own hue, I felt like Sinbad approaching the valley of diamonds, and almost expected to break my shins against lumps of gold and silver. I determined to advance and reconnoitre; so, leaving Ben and Charley to feed and cherish the cattle until my return, I put spurs to old Hope, and headed up the water at a more cheerful pace than we had known since daylight. I turned the spur of a ridge which came low upon the meadows of the streamlet. I heard a confused murmuring sound, the subdued 'voice of a vast congregation,' combined with a noise as of a multitude of steam mills. I rounded the cape, and, pulling up my horse, stared in wonder and excitement upon the strange scene which burst in suddenness upon me.

On a small meadow, and upon the slopes which rose gently from it, were massed nearly twenty thousand men. They were, with few exceptions, working more earnestly, more absorbingly, more silently than any body of labourers I had ever seen. They were delving, carrying heavy loads, filling and emptying buckets, washing the ore in thousands of cradles, which occupied every yard and foot of the creek, in which men stood waist-deep. Long streets and alleys of tents and shanties constituted a kind of township, where flaunting flags of all colours denoted stores and shops, and St. George's banner, hanging proudly unfurled, told that the majesty of the law, order, and the government was administered by Commissioners and supported by policemen.

I rode among the toilers, amid whom I soon found friends and acquaintances. On every side was evidence of the magical richness of the deposit. Nuggets were handed about with a careless confidence which denoted the easy circumstances of