Page:Short Stories (1912).djvu/45

38 There were six of us in it—my mate, the army officer; Sam Devere, an Irishman and a barrister; Abbott, a smart young fellow who had been in the police; Harry Allen, a Royal Academy of Music man from London, who played divinely on the fiddle and the concertina; "Dago," a Spaniard, and myself.

We picked up "Dago"—as we called him—not because we cared about him, but because we wanted an extra man to make up the six necessary to enable us to apply for a twelve-acre claim along the line of our reef; and "Dago" was loafing around doing nothing. That's how we roped him in. He was rather a sullen chap—dark, handsome, with a black moustache, very white teeth, and a trick of showing them when he smiled, which wasn't often. He talked a little English, of a sort, not unsparsely sprinkled with deities and "big-big-D's," and he camped by himself about a quarter of a mile below the claim on a bend of the Yugilbar creek, where he had put up a log humpy, thatched with sheets of stringy bark.

I strolled down there one Sunday, but he didn't make me welcome, so I never went near him again. "Dago," my mate and I worked in the same shift, two of us down the hole and one on top to wind up.

"Dago" and I had a difference of opinion one night—about a girl, of course. It was Christmas, and they had been having a jamboree in the camp and some dancing. The girl—there were only two altogether on the reefs—gave me a dance, and "Dago" didn't like it. So we quarreled, "Dago" and I, and he gave me some of his special brand of "English." I slipped into him and hurt him. In the middle of my forehead there is a sear—you can see it now—where the haft of the "Dago's" knife caught me in the scrimmage.

There were some words, but our mates separated us, and we went our ways. But "Dago" was never friends after that, and I hated being down the hole