Page:Short Stories (1912).djvu/54



Up in the diggings, and in fact pretty well all over the colonies, the good, old, genteel Elizabethan oath, "By our Lady!" has been contracted by frequent usage to "Bloody!" and formed three parts of the common language. Apparently there was no adjective or number of them considered so comprehensive. No sentence was complete without it. It was applied to everything—long, short, tall, thick or thin, high or low, deep or shallow, far or near, white, black or any color, quick or slow, good, bad or indifferent. There was no place where it was not dragged into service, except perhaps in the churches or public schools. And as there was no church at Maytown and the school-house was way off on a hill by itself, the refining influences of these two exceptional establishments were without effect.

If a penny had really been put in the tin can with a slit in the lid every time that particular oath was used in the bar of "Mine Haus" its landlord could long ago have retired from business. But his invitation to his patrons to fine themselves this modest sum each time they swore had gone disregarded for years, and the tin can stood upon the bar counter as a curio rather than as regulator of the language and morals of Maytown. Though the landlord who had first placed it there still ran the "pub," the miners swore unpunished, because for years it was "the only bloody pub in a hundred bloody miles."

"Mine Haus," as he called it, had been kept for years—in fact ever since the "good times" at Maytown—by a thick-set little German named Ahlers. He had several sons and daughters—one in the