twenty miles away! They
needed time to take that in all at once.

"I found it a month ago--I and some mates. I left them working on it
while I went and proclaimed it and got our reward claims registered. Now
we're safe we don't care who knows of it. There's men in hundreds coming
out along the road behind us, though we have got two days' start. But
what is that to us? There will be thousands soon--thousands all seeking
our gold-field, for there's gold across the ridge, boys--gold for the
lot of us."

The sun-dried walls and roof of the room shivered and cracked at the
reverberation of the mighty shout that went up from the throats of the
assembled men. The wild fever that had sent them roaming years and years
before in search of the fortune of yellow metal they had never yet
found, broke out in all its former vigour in their blood. There was gold
only twenty miles away! Gold to be had for the digging; gold in sand
and gravel that only needed washing and sluicing; gold that would give
them all their youth back again, and enable them once more to journey to
the homes they had left so long ago--it dazzled and maddened them,
wiping out their disappointments and blotting out their miseries. All
the furies of unmeasured imagination that had swept them off their
mental balance when first they had sought the bubble fortune came again
upon them anew, and in their shouting, capering frenzy they surged round
the four strangers and round and over Cudlip's bar. What liquor there
was to be seized was taken and swallowed before its owner could raise a
protest; but a dozen promises to pay ten times over for every nobbler
was made on all sides, and, like a wise man, Cudlip hesitated before he
opposed overwhelming odds.

The shout with which the news was greeted spread far beyond the Rest--as
far as the barren rocks and spear-grass covered patches of sandy soil
over which the outlying fossickers were hurrying for corroboration of
the news--and the sound of the mighty shout made their pulses tingle and
their blood run free.

Only one thing could make the men of the Boulder Creek dirt-holes shout
like that. Gold, more than specks and grains, had been found somewhere,
and the outlying stragglers quickened their pace in their haste to reach
the place before all the good fortune had gone round. When they reached
the house there was a babel of sounds in the bar-room, for round the
four strangers the entire population of the field was crow