Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/324

 other road, and the letter he'd wrote to his missus had gone astray. Billy wasn't surprised to hear that he was dead―he'd been killed before―but he was surprised about the five quid.

'You see, it must have been another bullock-driver that died. There was an old shanty-keeper up Coonamble way, so Billy said, that used to always mistake him for another bullocky and mistake the other bullocky for him―couldn't tell the one from the other no way―and he used to have bills against Billy that the other bullock-driver'd run up, and bills against the other that Billy'd run up, and generally got things mixed up in various ways, till Billy wished that one of 'em was dead. And the funniest part of the business was that Billy wasn't no more like the other man than chalk is like cheese. You'll often drop across some colour-blind old codger that can't tell the difference between two people that ain't got a bit of likeness between 'em.

'Then there was young Joe Swallow. He was found dead under a burned-down tree in Dead Man's Gully―'dead past all recognition,' they said―and he was buried there, and by-and-bye his ghost began to haunt the Gully: at least, all the school-kids seen it, and there was scarcely a grown-up person who didn't know another person who'd seen the ghost―and the other person was always a sober chap that wouldn't bother about telling a lie. But just as the ghost was beginning to settle down to work in the Gully, Joe himself turned up, and then the folks began to reckon that it was another man was killed there, and that the ghost belonged to the other man; and some of them