ace,' and that
sort of old thing--upset everything. You might follow good gold along
a ledge, just under the grass, till it suddenly broke off and the
continuation might be a hundred feet or so under your nose.

Had the 'ground' in the cemetery been 'open' Dave would have gone to the
point under which he expected the gold to lie, sunk a shaft there, and
worked the ground. It would have been the quickest and easiest way--it
would have saved the labour and the time lost in dragging heavy buckets
of dirt along a low lengthy drive to the shaft outside the fence. But
it was very doubtful if the Government could have been moved to open
the cemetery even on the strongest evidence of the existence of a rich
goldfield under it, and backed by the influence of a number of diggers
and their backers--which last was what Dave wished for least of all. He
wanted, above all things, to keep the thing shady. Then, again, the old
clannish local spirit of the old farming town, rooted in years way back
of the goldfields, would have been too strong for the Government, or
even a rush of wild diggers.

'We'll work this thing on the strict Q.T.,' said Dave.

He and Jim had a consultation by the camp fire outside their tent. Jim
grumbled, in conclusion,--

'Well, then, best go under Jimmy Middleton. It's the shortest and
straightest, and Jimmy's the freshest, anyway.'

Then there was another trouble. How were they to account for the size of
the waste-heap of clay on the surface which would be the result of such
an extraordinary length of drive or tunnel for shallow sinkings? Dave
had an idea of carrying some of the dirt away by night and putting it
down a deserted shaft close by; but that would double the labour, and
might lead to detection sooner than anything else. There were boys
'possum-hunting on those flats every night. Then Dave got an idea.

There was supposed to exist--and it has since been proved--another, a
second gold-bearing alluvial bottom on that field, and several had tried
for it. One, the town watchmaker, had sunk all his money in 'duffers',
trying for the second bottom. It was supposed to exist at a depth
of from eighty to a hundred feet--on solid rock, I suppose. This
watchmaker, an Italian, would put men on to sink, and superintend in
person, and whenever he came to a little 'colour'-showing shelf, or
false bottom, thirty or forty feet down--he'd go rooting round and spoil
the shaft, and then start to sink another. It w