bout two
miles from here. Is there a cattle station near here?"

"No. The cattle you saw belong to one of us--this man here," pointing to
Jansen, "will sell you a beast to-morrow, I daresay."

Then the armed protectors of the integrity from foreign invasion of the
rights of Chinkie's Flat nodded "Good evening" to Ah San, and walked
back across the road to the "Digger's Best," and the Chinamen, with
silent, childlike patience, resumed their loads and trotted along after
their leader. They disappeared over the hill, and ere darkness descended
the glare of their camp fires was casting steady gleams of light upon
the dark waters of the still pool beneath the ridge.

CHAPTER IV ~ GRAINGER AND JIMMY AH SAN TALK TOGETHER

It was eight o'clock in the morning, and Jimmy Ah San, a fat,
pleasant-faced Chinaman, dressed in European costume, came outside his
tent, and filling his pipe, sat down on the ground, and with his hands
clasped on his knees, saw six of the white men emerge from two or three
humpies, and walk down to the new shaft to begin work.

He was well acquainted with the previous history of the spot upon which
he was now gazing, and something like a scowl darkened his good-humoured
face as he looked upon the ragged, half-famished surrivors of his
company, and thought of the past horrors and hardships of the fearful
journey from the Cloncurty. Fifteen of their number had been murdered by
blacks in less than a fortnight, and the bones of half a dozen more, who
had succumbed to exhaustion or thirst lay bleaching on a strip of desert
country between the Cloncurry and the Burdekin River.

But Ah San was a man of courage--and resource as well--and his
five-and-twenty years' experience of bush and mining life in the Far
North of Australia enabled him to pilot the remainder of his men by
forced marches to the Cape River, where they had spelled for a month so
as to gain strength for the long stage between that river and Conolly's
Creek, on one of the deserted fields of which he hoped to settle and
retrieve his broken fortunes.

As he sat and watched and thought, eight or ten members of his company
came and crouched near him, gazing with hungry eyes at the heaps of
mullock and the mounds of tailings surrounding the "Ever Victorious"
battery, watching the Europeans at work, and wondering when they, too,
would give it up and follow their departed comrades. For the Chinamen
knew that those dry and dusty heaps of mulloc