osed to fight when in a corner,
that the breaking up of a "Chows' Camp" became more and more difficult,
and in the end the white diggers had to be content with surprising
outlying prospecting parties, chasing them with kangaroo dogs back to
their main camp, and burning their huts and mining gear, after first
making a careful search for gold, concealed under the earthen floor, or
among their ill-smelling personal effects. Sometimes they were rewarded,
sometimes not, but in either case they were satisfied that they were
doing their duty to Queensland and themselves by harrying the heathen
who raged so furiously, and were robbing the country of its gold.

Then, after old "Taeping" had succumbed to too much "Digger's Rest," and
Finnerty--now Peter Grattan Finnerty, Esq., Member of the Legislative
Assembly of Queensland--had left the Flat and become the champion of the
"struggling white miner" in the House at a salary of L300 a year, came
bad times, for the alluvial became worked out; and in parties of twos
and threes the old hands began to leave, heading westward across the
arid desert towards the Gilbert and the Etheridge Rivers, dying of
thirst or under the spears of the blacks by the way, but ever heedless
of what was before when the allurements and potentialities of a new
field lay beyond the shimmering haze of the sandy horizon.

Then, as the miners left, the few "cockatoo" settlers followed them,
or shifted in nearer to the town on the sea-coast with their horse and
bullock teams, and an ominous silence began to fall upon the Flat when
the tinkle of the cattle bells no longer was heard among the dark fringe
of sighing she-oaks bordering the creek. As day by day the quietude
deepened, the parrots and pheasants and squatter pigeons flew in and
about the Leichhardt trees at the foot of the bluff, and wild duck at
dusk came splashing into the battery dam, for there was now no one who
cared to shoot them; the merry-faced, rollicking, horse-racing young
bank manager and his baying pack of gaunt kangaroo dogs had vanished
with the rest; and then came the day when but eight men remained--seven
being old hands, and the eighth a stranger, who, with a blackboy, had
arrived the previous evening.

And had it not been for the coming of the stranger, Chinkie's Flat
would, in a few weeks, have been left to solitude, and reported to the
Gold-fields Warden as "abandoned and duffered out."

CHAPTER II ~ GRAINGER MAKES A "DEAL"