ooked at it critically and gave it back. Without a
word they resumed the march through the bush. The ground sloped down in
front of them, sparsely timbered and well grassed, and in the distance
they could see where it rose into a long rolling ridge. They were close
at the foot of the rise before they noticed a small creek running over
a gravelly bed and, beyond it, the framework of a tent and a lean-to
covered with boughs.

Gleeson and Walker both uttered exclamations as they saw the bare forks
and ridge-pole of the tent-frame, but the men behind did not pay any
heed. They wanted no telling the creek was where the gold was to be
found, and they scattered right and left as they rushed as fast as they
could to the banks of the stream, each man, directly he came to the
water, driving his pick into the ground and sitting on it. Two of them
had met just by the ruins of the tent, and while one stuck his pick into
the ground on one side of the stream, the other splashed through the
water and performed the same operation on the other side, so close to
where a hole had been dug that when he sat on his pick-handle, he
dangled his legs over the edge of the hole.

"Here, that's our claim. You'll have to clear out of that," Gleeson
shouted as he rushed up.

"That's our shaft," Walker yelled as he rushed up to the man sitting
over the hole.

A shout of derision came from the two men, and was echoed up and down
the creek as each fossicker turned round to enjoy the spectacle of a
"jump" at the outset of the field. Most of the men having stuck their
picks in their claims, sat on them, and adorned them with various bits
of rag to serve as banners of occupation. Being all neighbours from
Boulder Creek, they could trust one another, and were satisfied to leave
their patches under the protection of their "pegs," more especially as
things were becoming decidedly lively round what was already referred
to as the "reward" claim.

From shouting at one another, one side threatening and the other
defying, Walker had made a feint at the man by the hole. He, having
lived for many a year in the hope of one day pegging out his own patch
of alluvial on a new rush, would have defied dynamite to move him now
that he had his pick in the ground, now that he had performed all that
the unwritten but eternal laws of the mining fraternity needed to give
him sole and absolute rights over the few square yards of earth and all
the precious mineral he could