Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/38



were tramping down in Canterbury, Maoriland, at the time, swagging it―me and Bill―looking for work on the new railway line. Well, one afternoon, after a long, hot tramp, we comes to Stiffner's Hotel―between Christchurch and that other place―I forget the name of it―with, throats on us like sunstruck bones, and not the price of a stick of tobacco.

We had to have a drink, anyway, so we chanced it. We walked right into the bar, handed over our swags, put up four drinks, and tried to look as if we'd just drawn our cheques and didn't care a curse for any man. We looked solvent enough, as far as swagmen go. We were dirty and haggard and ragged and tired-looking, and that was all the more reason why we might have our cheques all right.

This Stiffner was a hard customer. He'd been a spieler, fighting man, bush parson, temperance preacher, and a policeman, and a commercial traveller, and everything else that was damnable; he'd been a journalist, and an editor; he'd been a lawyer, too. He was an ugly brute to look at, and 18