Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/247

 get a cut at the "stragglers." So presently we started again, the man with the leg sitting on the trap's seat beside Jimmy, and Jimmy smoking, and with a look of stolid satisfaction on his face, talking to the man with the leg about the various bad legs he had known, and now and then grunting an inquiry over his shoulder to his other patient in the body of the trap.

Mitchell asked Jimmy who the fancy mattresses were for, and he said they were for a stranger. "Man or woman?" asked Mitchell.

"Dunno yit," grunted Jimmy. "It ain't come yet."

They said at the station that four strangers at one time was Jimmy's record, but one or two said it wasn't.

I think that that old Jericho track, where so many men fell amongst thieves and were left sore, hurt, and like to die, would have been right into Jimmy's hands.

And, come to think of it, none of them "rightly knew" Jimmy's real name, or where he came from. Jimmy said "Somewheres."

But when he dies the boys will have a good headstone, if they have to bring it all the way from Sydney, and on it they'll have chiselled the words—

And underneath, if the advice of one prevails—

And men shall do likewise until the Great Strangers' Friend calls them.