deal of its
glory. The men who were camped along the ridge had no more money to
spend, and only an occasional traveller, passing along the road from the
east to the west, kept the place going as a solvent concern. Now and
again some prospectors, who had heard tales round distant camp-fires of
the hidden riches of Boulder Creek, journeyed down its course,
scrambling over the rough, tumbled boulders, and venting their opinions
in hot, scorching words as they remembered the tellers of the tales,
till they saw on the flat, halfway up the ridge, the symbol of
civilization in the form of Cudlip's Rest. Then the occupier for the
time being had some chance of making a profit on the year's occupation;
but otherwise, no one but a new chum would grant credit for drinks
against such payment in kind as cut timber and split rails for a whole
settlement of fossickers.

So the years went on, the men along the ridge dreaming of the leads and
pockets they one day might discover, and the owner of Cudlip's Rest
trying to persuade himself that there was a future in the field--until
one day a whisper went abroad. It ran from tent to tent and from shaft
to shaft, travelling up and down the gullies and the ridges by the
creek; bringing men to the surface from the bottom of the holes they had
been digging for months, and drawing them out of the drives and
cross-cuts they had been developing for years, and making them stand
with wide-open eyes gleaming in the sunlight, as they tried to reach
back through the profitless years for the mislaid energy of youth. It
travelled far and wide, wherever a man lived and toiled; and wherever
it sounded, men's eyes grew bright, and hope came again to faces that
had long since lost it, and to hearts that had long since grown numb.

No one knew who had spread it; no man heard another tell him that it was
true; but in the air it quivered, and every man heard it, and left his
work and his tent and his tools where they lay, whilst he hastened to
Cudlip's Rest for further news of the rumour that had reached him as he
laboured in his loneliness--that gold had been found; gold in payable,
ay, in richly payable, quantities.

Like the remnants of a routed army they came upon the old hotel, some up
the road, some down it, and others through the bush. A few had stopped
to get their coats, but most of them wore nothing over their soil-and
toil-stained shirts and moleskins. But as they came up to the house, and
stamped