tea, as a result of which Andy next morning rolled up his swag,
sorrowfully but firmly shook hands with Dave and Jim, and started to
tramp Out-Back to look for work on a sheep-station.

This was Dave's theory--drawn from a little experience and many long
yarns with old diggers:--

He had bottomed on a slope to an old original water-course, covered with
clay and gravel from the hills by centuries of rains to the depth of
from nine or ten to twenty feet; he had bottomed on a gutter running
into the bed of the old buried creek, and carrying patches and streaks
of 'wash' or gold-bearing dirt. If he went on he might strike it rich
at any stroke of his pick; he might strike the rich 'lead' which was
supposed to exist round there. (There was always supposed to be a rich
lead round there somewhere. 'There's gold in them ridges yet--if a man
can only git at it,' says the toothless old relic of the Roaring Days.)

Dave might strike a ledge, 'pocket', or 'pot-hole' holding wash rich
with gold. He had prospected on the opposite side of the cemetery, found
no gold, and the bottom sloping upwards towards the graveyard. He had
prospected at the back of the cemetery, found a few 'colours', and the
bottom sloping downwards towards the point under the cemetery towards
which all indications were now leading him. He had sunk shafts across
the road opposite the cemetery frontage and found the sinking twenty
feet and not a colour of gold. Probably the whole of the ground under
the cemetery was rich--maybe the richest in the district. The old
gravediggers had not been gold-diggers--besides, the graves, being six
feet, would, none of them, have touched the alluvial bottom. There
was nothing strange in the fact that none of the crowd of experienced
diggers who rushed the district had thought of the cemetery and
racecourse. Old brick chimneys and houses, the clay for the bricks of
which had been taken from sites of subsequent goldfields, had been put
through the crushing-mill in subsequent years and had yielded 'payable
gold'. Fossicking Chinamen were said to have been the first to detect a
case of this kind.

Dave reckoned to strike the 'lead', or a shelf or ledge with a good
streak of wash lying along it, at a point about forty feet within the
cemetery. But a theory in alluvial gold-mining was much like a theory
in gambling, in some respects. The theory might be right enough, but old
volcanic disturbances--'the shrinkage of the earth's surf