Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/249

, my partner thar"——And the last glimpse of Tennessee, the grave filled up the grave in the little digger's vegetable garden, I've seen them in Australia Tennessee sitting on the foot of the mound, wiping his face with his red bandana handkerchief.

They used to say I was influenced by Bret Harte. I hope so. I read "Tennessee's Partner" and the other stories when I was about thirteen, and Dickens a little later on. Bret Harte died near to where I lived in England, by the way.

Tennessee forgave his partner the greatest wrong that one man can do another; and that's one thing that mateship can do.

The man who hasn't a male mate is a lonely man indeed, or a strange man, though he have a wife and family. I believe there are few such men. If the mate isn't here, he is somewhere else in the world, or perhaps he may be dead.

Marcus Clarke speaks of a recaptured convict being asked where his mate was, in a tone as if a mate were something a convict was born with—like a mole, for instance. When I was on the track alone for a stretch, I was always asked where my mate was, or if I had a mate.

And so it is, from "Boko Bill" (bottle-ho!) and "Three-Pea Ginger," of Red Rock Lane, up or down—or up and down—to Percy and Harold who fraternize at the Union Club. Bill gets "pinched" for shifting cases from a cart, or something of that sort, and Ginger, who is "pretty swift with the three-pea," but never