Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/513

2, 1863.]

was about midnight, towards the latter end of the month of June, that I stepped out of the Red-shirt store into the still, silent night. It was full moon, and clear and distinct as at noonday I could see the opposite bank of the gully, dotted with here and there a tent, while hundreds of bare poles and deserted chimneys told the tale of a diggings once prosperous, but now rapidly declining. Below me I could hear the swollen creek foaming and fretting in its bed, but its waters were invisible, for a dense mass of fog, which rose to within a few feet of where I was standing, brooded over and concealed them. On the opposite side of the gully, some twenty feet above the fog level, stood a solitary tent, the sparks issuing from the chimney of which showed that its occupant kept up a good fire.

“This is a nice night to cross the gully in,” thought I. “It is about ten to one that I shall miss the tree; and, even if I find it, it’s no fun groping one’s way in the dark across a slippery trunk with ten feet of water under one. If I thought old Jackson had turned in for the night, I’d go back and camp down before Sydney Bill’s fire.”

As I leant, irresolute, against an old charred