Gordon might have made
an epic out of it, but I'm hanged if I'm poet enough to appreciate the
country or philosopher enough to ignore the sheer physical discomforts
of the journey."

"If you'd been through the things I've been through," I asserted, "if
you'd been in New Guinea when there was a gold-strike on and had to
climb hundreds of feet up a straight cliff to get to the fields, hanging
on all the time to creepers as thick as your wrist, you'd think this was
just Paradise. If you'd been with me in the sweltering Solomon Island
jungle, where every breath you took made the perspiration stand out on
your forehead in big beads, or up in the Klondyke when it was fifty
below and a man's own breath turned into ice about his mouth, you'd know
what life really meant. Here you're in the Garden of Victoria; you see
sights that knock some of the beauty spots of the world into a cocked
hat, and all you can do is growl at the country. You can't expect to go
up and down the mountain side in a lift or anything of the sort."

"It's all very well for you to talk like that," he objected. "You're
used to this kind of life; we're not. That makes all the difference."

"So it seems," I said. "But I haven't the slightest intention of giving
in yet. As a matter of fact I rather think we've been a little too sure
that we were on the right track. We haven't been as careful as we might.
We've gone along blindly."

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Just this. We've been so infernally confident that we only had to find
a clump of wattle and a lone tree, and we were there. Now that lone tree
must be somewhere on the east side of the valley, and, despite the fact
that it's on high ground, it's so hidden that we wouldn't see it until
we were almost on top of it. It might be perfectly visible from inside
the valley, and at the same time be hidden from the outside by another
hill. As for the wattle, has it ever struck you that wattle only begins
to spring into bloom about the end of August? It's almost April now, and
you wouldn't find anything but just a mass of green bushes."

"If there was a valley, which same I'm beginning to doubt," Cumshaw said
doggedly, "we'd have found it before this."

"I don't know what Miss Drummond is cooking for our tea," I remarked
irrelevantly, "but it smells good."

"If you think you can put me off that way," Cumshaw said, "you're mighty
mistaken. I'm tired of it all, and for two pins----"

"You know very we